


Beg

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Series: TF2 prompts and drabbles [7]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: BDSM, Begging, Daddy Kink, Enthusiastic Consent, Espionage, Espionage recruiting, Extremely Dubious Consent, Extremely hard BDSM, F/M, Feeding Kink, First Time Bottoming, Large Cock, M/M, Mirror Sex, Orgy, POV First Person, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Police state, Power Imbalance, Sex Work, Shameless Smut, Size Kink, VERY risky sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-11 08:57:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 38,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7041634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the very NSFW headcannons found here:<br/>http://tf2-headcanons.tumblr.com/post/145158703358/if-they-become-desperate-enough-how-would-the</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Soldier

There is a scar near the back of his head, just above the swirl he has tried to make invisible by shaving his hair nearly to his scalp. But the curl remains, a whorl begging to be set free from the too tight constraints of his helmet and all the ridiculous rules he’s invented for himself.

He won’t look at me.

I expected as much. This proud bull of a man, thick slabs of muscle twitching, his wide shoulders lined and bulging in the half-light of his desk lamp, too proud to believe that he kneels on the floor at the request of someone half his size and poured into a shape he has always believed was weaker.

I expected his shame, the high burning blush in his cheeks, the gloss of something more sweat than tears in his eyes, the restless shift that sets his muscles to crawling beneath his tanned skin.

I expected his shame just as I expected this, the sight of a man accustomed to towering over others, to signaling his superiority through every word, every moment spent looking down at the world with a sneer, on his knees, head lowered, abased and abashed.

He won’t look at me, his eyes boring into the floor between his knees, the rough cotton of his BDUs hissing slightly as it moves with his breath. The buttons of his fly creak with pressure, and it makes me want to laugh—they are experiencing a great deal of pressure, trying to contain him.

He’s under pressure.

I won’t make him ask yet. That’s not the point, not why I’ve spent a week teasing him to within a heartbeat of orgasm and sauntered off, with what I’m sure was an obnoxious smirk. The first time, he took it well enough—he looks a lot ruder than he is—and merely complained a little before going back to the various things he does.

I don’t care what he does when we aren’t here.

I knew this was a war of attrition, the slow process of peeling away his patience, his need for control, one stifled breath at a time as I came back again and again, never using the same approach twice, invading his body with my mouth, my hands, with surprise, reaching over under the table at dinner to drag my nails across the fabric of his pants, vibrating his cock where it lay until his whole body vibrated in sympathy while someone else tried to talk to him, dropping to my knees in the shower to let the twin pleasure of my mouth and the sight of my head bobbing do to him what it does, grabbing his wrist when he would pleasure himself and bending him at the waist, my hips pressed to his ass, hand squeezing then moving up and down as his eyes closed and his fingers dug furrows into the counter in front of him, door left open to tease him with the promise that someone would see him there, see my much smaller body behind him and the way he bent for it, teasing him with the idea that his friends would finally know what I know about him, how much he needs the pleasure he cannot give himself.

Four days into that week, he started to tremble when he saw me, a sympathetic bond between us being plucked at the sight of my smile and the knowledge of what I can do to him. I even insisted he try to fuck someone else, knowing the same way I know how to drive him wild that he would not be able to get hard, even when faced with the release he needs, because I was not there with him.

He got angry with me on day six after he tried to fuck someone else, tried to get rid of the tension that knotted his guts and made him eye me with something like dread and a hunger so far into violence that he was terrified to touch me. He bellowed, face red, veins like ropes under his skin, an animal sound that he filled with nonsense while cowering from me as I stalked him into the corner and stared at him, for all the world as if I were the large one and he the small.

He could not do it. Hours spent touching himself, the woman he chose touching him, sucking him, and finally spitting contemptuously at him when he could not respond to her.

The lesson was simple enough—that pleasure is mine.

I watched him cower for awhile before simply turning and leaving him there, cowering, ripening in ways he did not know he could, not quite ready for this moment, for the last day of this little game.

From the floor he sighs, a breeze from the very bottom of his lungs, breaking the silence between us to empty himself out. I don’t know if he fully understands why he’s here, just that he is here, and that in some fundamental way, I have beaten him.

And I have. Size is not power, _will_ is power, or this man who so dwarfs me would not be here, on his knees, waiting impassively for whatever I choose to give him.

When I nudge him with the toe of my shoe, he reaches forward, clinging to my calf like a drowning man, begging more sincerely than any words I could possibly trust from his mouth. When I don’t pull my leg from his grasp, he starts rubbing, his breath quickening with hope, with the hope that if he makes me feel good, I will give him what he needs.

I let him rub for a moment, then stretch slightly to put my foot between his thighs, pointing my toes until he could, if he were willing to forget himself that much, hump it.

The suggestion, of course, is that this is all I’m going to let him have.

He freezes, his big, scarred hands engulfing my calf, and a thrill shoots through me. This is where he either chooses to obey or kicks my ass, but I’m almost certain he won’t.

The shallow sliver of skin visible on his forehead changes color again, his breath hitching. He is on fire with shame, and need, and fear, and the strangest sense of falling as the world he thought he knew parts and another world lies behind it.

I rock my foot, running the smooth bottom of my shoe along the thick bar of his erection and he makes a sound like a dry sob, choked off and quiet.

There is a quick flash of gray as his eyes dart up, unable to believe I am doing this, or perhaps just that he’s going to let me, that his hips are already canting forward, a fraction of an inch, a fraction of friction that hits him like a brick in a pillowcase.

He is stunned, but his hips are still moving the tiniest bit, his fingers eagerly searching my leg and crawling up it, trying to ensure that I will let him finish, let him relieve the pressure that’s been driving him mad and indulge the obsession I’ve spent some time infecting him with.

I smile down at him, letting him see the cold light of cruelty that burns in me, the fact that I know exactly what I’m doing to him and what it looks like, what it means to him, and he cannot look away again, transfixed as if I had nailed him to the wall, his hips still moving as his breath quickens, flushed lips falling open and plumping.

Lust is beautiful on him, the helplessness of it replacing his cocky surety, the damnable way he moves through the world like it owes him something for being large, for being a man.

It is beautiful to watch him like this, hopeless and burning, afire with need and the knowledge that only I can fulfill him, the knowledge that he is finally helpless before someone who is the opposite of everything he thought was strong and admirable.

I part my knees, letting his fingers crawl up the inside of my thighs, pushing up the bell of my skirt and finding that I did not bother with underwear.

That stops him. That and the smell that shouts in its own way—salt and seawater, sweet and musk and wild—that I am amused.

I grab his wrist and guide his hand in, letting him wet his fingers before putting them firmly in his mouth.

His breath stutters, and I can see his jaw working, his tongue desperate to find and taste and absorb any trace of me, desperate because he cannot know if he will get more and he must make this as good as he can. As he watches, I wriggle the skirt up, his face inches from me and across a chasm he simply cannot cross on his own.

I nudge him with my foot again and he goes back to the small movement that rub him on the bottom of my shoe, his eyes glued to the triangle of hair that glistens softly in the light. The fingers of his free hand dance, digging into his muscled thighs, but he must be obedient and so one hand stays in his mouth and the other merely digs pale half-moons in his thigh through the cotton.

It is amusing. I surprise myself when I laugh, the sound just as filthy as I could have wanted—rich and deep and very nearly a purr. He flinches, but his cock gives a heavy throb beneath my foot.

I pull the fingers from his mouth and raise his chin, yanking his eyes up my body to my face. I ask him a question, wordless, the expression on my face demanding an answer, and he blushes like a little girl found raiding the cookie jar.

It’s sufficient, but I will get more out of him.

When I stand, he takes a breath, but I don’t let him speak. Instead, I sling a leg over his shoulders, pulling his head in, and the eager grunt he makes is musical. I let him help me onto the desk, wrapping those huge hands around my ass as if he is terrified I will pull away, his chin already nudging apart my lips and being anointed by the slick heat he finds there.

I’m going to make him work for noise from me as well and he is starving for it, the loud wet smack of his tongue starting as he burrows it into me, seeking, his fingers tightening on the globes of my ass until I am sure they will leave blotchy prints, tongue now dragging up, finding the already engorged peak of my clit and circling, teasing the way he has learned that I like, coaxing it further and further until my need is something like pain, an emptiness that demands filling and I wrench his head up, his face glistening from mid-cheek to the faint divot of his chin.

He makes a tiny noise before he stops himself, a tiny creak of complaint quickly strangled into nothing, but we both heard it.

I flip my hands and he scoots back, then I point at his shitty bed, the tiny lumpy mattress and creaking metal frame that makes such ridiculous noises when we’re both in it.

I’m about to knock a hole in the wall with his headboard, and quite possibly pop a few of the springs off the goddamn frame.

When I point at it, he looks at me, his eyebrows knotting. My response is to look him up and down, raking him with my eyes, and flick the cotton of his tank top out of the waist of his BDUs.

He gets the point quickly and practically tears his clothes off, a faint sheen of sweat already making the room smell like his animal body, the big mass of it trembling with eagerness, musky and salty and primed to dive into me with the same kind of reckless enthusiasm he uses on the battlefield.

God, he is a magnificent beast, hard and deadly and thoughtlessly strong.

I take my time undressing, watching him start forward and stop, knowing that if he offends me in the slightest, I will simply leave him here, aching and burning in turns, knowing that if I will not give him what he wants, he can’t get it anywhere else.

The last scrap of cloth off, I point at the bed and he practically pounces it, the springs shrieking. A push on his shoulder and he’s laying on his back, hands coiling and uncoiling in the sheets, great sails of his lungs raggedly inflating with the race of his heart.

I put his hands on the headboard. I’ll let him touch me later, but for now he can suffer the little torture of being unable to do what he wants to do, while I do what I want to and sink down on him with a hiss, eyelids fluttering as the emptiness which had been nagging at me is filled, excruciatingly, electricity in heat lightning arching up my spine, thighs and back flexing until I can sit, filled to the brim with the magic that is fucking.

When I open my eyes, his face is soft with it, the magic and wonder and the knowledge that I am fucking him.

I am a magnificent beast, too, and I show him in an undulation that rises like a slow wave, hips churning a long ellipse as the ripple travels up the curve of my belly and rolls my head back, nipples already hard. I show him as the ripple travels back down again, one hip then the other rising, a tide that tugs and pulls and caresses and rubs, just inside the shallow border to insanity without quite crossing over, the need to move that I will not let him have as he watches me dance, a dance old as time, my hips in their circles, the muscles inside me gripping, eyes closed, head thrown back to let my hair caress him as I come forward and back, slow and inexorable and without mercy, the hard bar of him inside me stroking, torturing, filling, linked together in flesh and the breath that passes through us like spirit.

When I look down at him, he is rapt, muscles in his arms rigid with strain, chest heaving, empty of everything but need and a war to keep doing what I have told him to do. He stiffens when he realizes I’m watching him, uncomfortable and worried, and I squeeze him deliberately inside me, rings of muscle rippling to steal his breath.

It does. He stops breathing for a moment, unable to do anything but stare. Keeping his eyes, I caress myself as he longs to do, fingers trailing over the peaks of my nipples to make myself gasp, eyes mocking him for what he cannot have but wants to, hips still churning out their circles as the electricity in me is honeyed, rising sweet and thick and closer than thought.

That noise again, a rasping little whine, and I stop, thighs flexed to hold myself up so that only the first half-inch of him is still in me.

I wait.

He flushes, turns his head away and then back, expressions flying across his face like the high, invisible clouds. I shift slightly and I can see him relax, but when I don’t keep moving, he tenses up again.

I am waiting for him to say it.

He knows this.

He can’t bring himself to say it, so I grab the headboard above him and shift forward slightly, getting comfortable for a long wait.

I can look down on him this way, the way he looks down on everyone, with a slightly bored smile.

I am anything, _anything_ but bored, not that he needs to know that.

His tongue darts out, licking his lips once, twice, back and again as he tries to say it. The headboard gives a tortured groan as his arms tighten.

I merely blink slowly. Patiently. He will do it.

He’s rehearsing it even now, his lips shaping the right word that he cannot let out.

I sigh and go to pull myself off him, because he needs the incentive, and he finally says it. Whispers it, really.

 _Please. More_.

The words are like… they are like… I know he can feel the inside of me drawing up, sucking at him, the complex changes a woman’s body makes just before she falls back into the star-spangled darkness of pleasure.

But because he is a good boy after all, his hands stay on the headboard until I pull them off, placing them on my hips.

 _Fuck me_ , I hiss, leaning down until my hair is a curtain around our heads.

And my god, does he.


	2. The Engineer

The most adorable thing about him is his presence, the way he swaggers into a room as if he were six feet tall and full of fire, this short, mostly bald man with a too sweet drawl that hides the barbs of his ferocious sarcasm. He is nearly too clever and lonely with it, the need to find someone to talk to, someone to feel as if he could like and be liked by, and the poison pen of his wit is as much to punish the world for leaving him lonely as it is to punish himself for being what he cannot help.

He is a freak, an anomaly, and he knows it.

He knew it before he filled the wall of his office with degrees, before he forced the world to admit that he may be short, bald, and too round for beauty, but he has a power of his own, is a power that must be reckoned with.

I love it about him, that ambition and the subtle bitterness that his long years alone have taught him. I love the way he expects me to flinch back and not to simply absorb his darts, the back-flash of hope in his eyes when I don’t and the little games he devises, testing me. He cannot simply let himself believe that I could want him, really want him and not just admire his mind in an abstract way.

But I do. I want his short, compact body, the triangle of his shoulders exaggerated by his height, muscles cloaked in a thin layer of softness, the bulge of his belly that rumbles so enticingly when he laughs. I want to plumb the depths of him, to feel him surrender before me and let himself be pliant where he is always on guard.

I want to feed him a fine meal, to watch the pleasure of it flush his face as he tries to resist the idea that someone could want him this way, viscerally, hope and self-mockery making his eyes dart to mine and drop as he makes a terrible joke and aches with hope and the acid etch of self-hate.

And so I do—two days of careful preparation, marinades of citrus and allium, honey and blood-red oranges, the crisp circles of chilies slowly going limp as the pork greedily sucks the flavor from all of it before being grilled lightly, just enough to cook it faintly pink and leave a fine mesh of charcoal from the flame and the bars of the grill. Pie and mashed potatoes, gravy reduced for a full day from the bones and organs of fowl, a salad that artfully foils the rest of the table with its fresh, green bitterness, a plate of cheeses and five kinds of wine, a bisque so delicately sweet that it brought tears to my eyes when I sampled it.

I over-prepared, really. There’s no way he could possibly eat it all, but this is my display of overwhelming force.

Well, one of them. I have five inches on him, and if it came to it I could bundle him up like a child and do whatever I liked, not that it would suffice.

I want so much more from him than just sex.

His eyes are glorious—pale blue, tight with suspicion, he eyes me at the door like he expects to be told this is a joke, traveling up my shoulders to find my face and scouring it for rejection.

That’s not what he finds.

He pulls his hat from his head, respectful, his hands flexing the brim, the well-worn cotton of his shirt crisp as he moves, jeans whispering.

I love that he dresses like this, a man who could afford to wear anything choosing to wear the same Wrangler snap shirts and jeans of his childhood, boots heavily creased and polished, shuffling slightly as he crosses my threshold and closes the door behind himself, putting his hat on the table just to his right.

He looks up at me and I smile, beckoning him to the table, to the silver and mismatched china I know he will appreciate because it speaks so loudly of being lived in, of the necessities of life. A thrill runs through me as his mouth sags open briefly, taking in the sheer volume of things stacked on my table, the fact that my plates do not match but I have still laid them out formally and the fact that I would know such minutae.

I can see him updating what he thinks he knows about me, eyes blank for a moment as he tucks it away in the great vaults of his mind.

We are men, and it is too early for me to tuck him into the table like I want to, this thing still too fragile for me to give him the kind of selfless, even babying attention he craves, so I sit down. After a moment, he follows, measuring me across the small circle of my table.

He is, above all, a cautious man, so he does not eat until I do, until I am preoccupied by the pleasure of the meal. I have out-done myself really, and it takes some effort to stop eating before I am completely stuffed, lost in the spangled explosions of my palate.

He does not suffer from such a compulsion, coming back for seconds, a startled moan breaking from his lips when he samples my bisque then flushes, afraid to meet my eyes. I heard him, but I will pretend for now that I did not, just to give him this small shield for his modesty. He goes back to eating with a will, as I knew he would.

Men like him treat their bodies like a mere life-support system for their minds, and in doing so forget and are overwhelmed by the gifts it can offer them.

He is not so gauche as to loosen his belt but I can tell he wants to, his free hand coming down to touch his belly and then flying back up.

I wonder when he last felt like this, when he last gave his senses their due instead of shoveling something into his mouth before going back to solving a problem, or drafting yet another device, challenging only the parts of himself above the neck.

When he finally mumbles out a compliment, I grin at him, or rather I beam. I am quite proud of what I have done, just as proud as I am of the effect it’s having on him.

 _I out-did myself_ , I say, and he nods easily, already half-seduced by comfort.

The wary look on his face fades quickly when I get up, refilling my wine, and wander over to my couch to curl up in a corner, leaning against its arm. He joins me, carefully sitting as far away as possible and then sinking down into the pillows and spreading out with a sigh of relief at the feeling and the pressure he is able to let off with his arms and legs limp on either side of the firm bowl of his belly.

I buy for comfort, the ultra-soft plush of the velvet fine and silky against his skin and mine, both because I am a creature of my senses and because seduction starts a long time before I do what I can do with hands and mouth and cock.

I cannot prevent myself from sighing either, the soft fabric cupping me and soothing the soreness from my legs and feet. I’ve been preparing all day, and it takes its toll. The wine I chose to end the meal is a symphony of crushed and bruised blackberries, tart and woody, the faintest hint of smoke and earth finishing it out, this deep red liquid.

He has mimicked me and it bodes well, his glass filled with the same liquid, an unconscious mirroring that tells me he is already aligning us somewhere in his head.

No doubt he believes he will be in command there. He cannot let himself want what he wants, so accustomed to having to beat his superiority into the whole world for such a minor thing as his height and the fact that he is not supposed to be beautiful.

But he is, in fact, beautiful—a face may fade, but the bonfire of his personality will remain a splendid thing when he has to use a walker to get around. I will never understand why the world is so fixated on appearance when it is so fleeting and so easy to make into a lie.

I let the silence stretch, a tiny hint of discomfort that he will feel compelled to fill, replete with digestion but still unable to prevent himself from poking at me one more time to test what I will do about it.

He makes an empty gesture at small talk and I smile at him, lazy but not sleepy, and shrug, eyes slowly wandering from his lips down to his belly and following the thick trunks of his thighs down to the floor before coming back up again.

His cheeks are flushed, both with the processes of digestion and with the faintest suggestion of embarrassment, but his face is open, questioning, even hoping.

And into it, I drop my approval, the statement that I love to share such an enjoyable thing with a good friend, the pause before friend shouting that it is a euphemism and there is more beneath it, if he wants to probe.

He starts to believe me then, the quick dilation of his pupil, so black against the pale blue of his eyes, telling me more than anything that we have crossed over one of the boundaries he has put up and he has to entertain the idea that I am sincere.

He eyes me, letting it become heated, letting me see an interest I’m sure he thought he’d hidden well.

I am more observant, I think, than the men he’s accustomed to. It’s been plain to me since we met that he considered me this way, that he has considered what it would be like to strip me nude and what I might do to him.

I place my glass on the side table with a definitive clink, and he does the same.

He expects, impossible man that he is, to pull me into his lap, because of course he must top if he is to be respected. I will let him at first, my knees framing his hips on the couch, careful to hold my weight off his belly, my hands reaching to cup his jaw and needled by the shadow he cannot seem to shave away.

His arms come around me easily, a squeeze suggesting their strength as if I did not know that despite appearances, he was a force to be reckoned with here, as well.

The kiss starts tentative between us both, both still checking and double checking to see if we mean it, if we mean to touch each other this way, if desire is the path of our touch and not the constant threat of pain.

His mouth is skilled, I have to give him that, the hint of sourness from the wine fading into the muscular stroke of his tongue on mine, the faint rock of his hips suggesting more, trying to build in me a heat that he can control.

He is skilled, but not as skilled as I am, pulling from him the heat and the need for control and replacing it with the tickling glide of my lips on his, the tug of my tongue and the dart as it explores his reactions, seeking and finding sensations that make his arms go limp for a moment as my hands on his face tighten, prisoning him beneath me to take in the promise of my cock gliding against the tip of his, my mouth demanding what he wants, more than anything, to be able to give.

And for a moment, he surrenders into it. Softly, sweetly, hungrily letting me do what I want to do, before flinching back, afraid the way his life has taught him to be afraid of losing control.

His eyes are hard and they batter my face, fear giving them a white rim as he looks for the punch line, the unreasonable thing that he knows will be there and will be enough evidence for him to push me aside, to raise his fist and prove that he is not the sweetly yielding thing he showed himself to be.

I release his face with a stroke from my thumbs and wait, the fondness I have learned for him giving me a gentle half-smile, my lips reddened from that kiss, that wonderful kiss, achingly hard in my slacks and burning with the need to finish what we’ve started, to show him what I know he needs.

He blinks. Once, twice, longing turning the corners of his lips down, his arms still rigid around me because no matter what he may think of me or what I want, his body knows what I’m offering him.

When he doesn’t shove me off, I lean in again, slowly, hands loose on the back of the couch and framing his head, coming back to brush my lips against his and waiting for them to open again.

They do, with a sound so faint I can only feel it vibrate, his breath emptying into my mouth, arms loosening slightly with something that is not yet surrender, but an awareness that he will not have to beat me to regain his prickly honor.

He lets me nudge his chin back with my head, lips trailing the strong cords of his neck and waiting to feel him shudder against me, to feel the small changes that tell me here and here and there, light pressure becoming deep as my mouth opens, suction slowly moving from teasingly light to deep, my teeth grazing his neck and fraction by fraction tightening until he gasps, my hips moving as I stroke us together.

His arms loosen again, caught up by it, the pleasure that started in a meal and continues in the thunder of his pulse, heat and blood gathering in his cock and demanding something, anything more than the hiss of my slacks against his jeans.

Desire, but we are still in safe places where he thinks that he will remain safely on top, safely in the little space he allows himself to be a body, the little hole he has carved in his dignity to let himself enjoy anything but the fight.

He lets me slide down to my knees, kneeling between his thighs, lets me finger and then pull the snaps on his shirt apart with a tiny pop. I can see wariness on his face as I look at his belly, swollen tight with the meal—he knows we are all supposed to be gods among men, tall and sculpted like statues, too much marble for the marbling of fat.

Silly man.

He’d like to shrink back, he would, but he lets me pull his undershirt up and over his shoulders, lets me unbuckle his belt with a groan and pop the button, unzip him and he rises up to let me pull his jeans from his legs but I push him back down onto the couch.

We’re not there yet.

He looks startled again. We’re not following his script, and this troubles him because he controls everything. _Everything_.

But I’m not a danger to him now and he’s curious. He’s the most curious man I know.

I lean in and put both hands on his belly, the tan of my skin a beautiful contrast to the pale flesh of his belly, fingers spread to touch the dark brown silk of his hair where it arrows down, from collarbones to disappear into the rouched rim of his boxers.

He’s uncomfortable, but he’s not that uncomfortable, and when I start to stroke the aching bowl of his belly he takes a breath of protest, then with a shrug I can feel but not see, lets himself sink back into the couch.

This takes patience, unseating men like him from the little thrones they erect in their heads. Patience and what I like to think of as a little mental jujitsu—I have to hit him where he does not expect, even where he does not see, and stay there, knocking him out of his expectations.

The flesh strains against my hands, tight and hot with the meal, his body flushed, and I trail my fingers across it, ruffling his hair and seeking beyond my sight to find muscle and tension, to find pleasure where he did not know it could be.

He is far, far too accustomed to back-alley blowjobs.

I start by soothing him, a place he did not know we would go, rubbing from him the complaint of his flesh from the meal, and he melts into the couch, his eyes finally closing, watch down, guards napping at their posts, even the thick meat of his thighs finally going slack, his knees flat against the cushions.

When I kiss his belly, he merely cracks an eye open, a perfunctory sliver to check that things are as he thinks they will be.

I kiss the top of it, fingers stroking down the sides of his belly and finally tracing the line of his boxers to watch the bumps rise and fall in the wake of my hands. He sighs heavily, eyelids fluttering once, hands open on either side of his thighs.

I am in no hurry and I am teaching him this, just as I am teaching him that obeying me has its rewards. When I tug gently at his boots he lets me pull them free, then helps me wriggle his pants and boxers away until he lies, nude and lovely, on my couch.

The expression on his face is expectation. I don’t think he realizes that he is naked but I am fully clothed, and that is a symbol for power.

His brows furrow when I stand, then pull him to his feet. He doesn’t like this reminder of our sizes, the height difference that makes me more than his equal in a fight.

He likes it less when I pull him into my lap, stiffening and pushing at me with his hands. I let him hold himself away from me, stuck fast in the circle of my arms.

 _What are you doing_ , he asks, once more expecting to have to defend himself and his territory, his reputation from me as if we were strangers again. In response, I lean forward and press a kiss to his chest, to the tingling flesh of his belly that I have stroked into heat and lassitude.

He takes a breath, again preparing himself for the fight we will not have because this is a pretty form of persuasion, my lips on him, my arms tight and strong and confining, his body yearning to let go just this once, to let someone else take the burden of control from him.

It is a pretty form of persuasion and an effective one. His resistance stems from the idea that I will mock him and not from the real danger, that I will give him what he is too terrified to dream of. Every soft kiss is a knock on that door, battering it down one by one to let in a flood of intoxication.

He cannot stand against it. He can’t even muster enough will to complain, his thighs settling easily on either side of my hips, arms curling around my neck as he leans back just a little, to give me better access.

I take advantage of this, a twitch of my hips pressing me hard against the root of his cock before I draw back slightly to use the silky glide of friction, back and forth against him as my arms hold him up.

He swears, sound guttural and easily mistaken for the moan it wants to be. Bit by precious bit, his nerves sending sweet fire to his brain and the neglected parts of his body singing my song, the song I am teaching them.

I am in no hurry here, as well. I know that the friction, the wet heat of my mouth and the arms that cup him will not quite be enough. They will get him drunk, so drunk that he would be hard pressed to walk a straight line, but they will not let him finish.

He expects me to get it over with, all those back-alley blowjobs again, furtive and rushing for a finish before zipping up and going back to his daring swagger.

Wrong game, my dear Texan.

It teases me as well as him, and I’m not proud to say that I was ready to nail him to a wall before he could not take it anymore, his fingers tightening in my shirt, snarl twisting his lips as he demanded, demanded that I finish it and him, let him pick back up and leave the man he came in, adorable swagger intact and unruffled despite the fact that he is naked, sweating, grinding himself against my fully clothed body, swallowed up in my arms and vulnerable.

He cannot let himself be vulnerable, or so he thinks. I wrap an arm more fully around him, crushing us together, and let the other trail down to the tight globe of his ass, massaging, teasing the skin that already prickles and runs with heat. He freezes and I look at him, eyebrow cocked with every last erg of arrogance I can muster, hips tilting against his.

This is a chance, a risk and a large one, that he will be so afraid of being out of control that he will tear himself away, dressing and stomping out into the night.

But I laid my trap well, one little bit at a time, pleasure rising up to smite him with a hunger that he cannot sate on his own.

I can see it in his face, his eyes grown huge, a potent mix of fear and need and the submission he so carefully hides pouring off of him like the sweat that glistens in the fur of his chest.

He needs this. Oh yes, he does.

I smile wickedly, fingers seeking the tight muscles beneath his ass, the ones that must be aching with tension, and it cuts his strings like a puppet, body curling forward to lie where our sizes make him, forehead pressed to the butterfly curve of my collar bone.

And oh god does it intoxicate me, this man of competition, this man who beats his opponents into the ground with an arrogant snarl breathing heavy and moist into the cloth of my shirt. His hips curve up just a little, seeking my fingers and seeking to give them access, to let them sweetly punish the rigidity from the muscle and leave it pliant.

His skin must be burning, sweat sticking my shirt to my chest, a subtle shudder dancing his ass in my hand as I press him crushingly tight into me, telling him without words that he is mine now, and there is no escape.

He bites me when I circle into to the soft pucker of his hole, a great mouthful of skin and shirt that will leave the clear imprint of his teeth, though the muscle flutters at my fingers, inviting.

If he thinks to punish me, he has the wrong man. I love being bitten, the man reverting to an animal, the need to share pain and pleasure overriding all else, and I moan for him.

He freezes again, mouth full of skin—the brat—but I can feel him surge against me. He wants to know this is not one way, that I am not undoing him without being undone myself, and if he thinks this is all the undoing we’re doing, he is going to be in for a rude shock.

I dip the tip of a finger into him, testing, and he mutters something into my chest. I don’t think he does this normally, though I am dead sure he has dreamed about it, his fist a blur before he spurts into his sheets.

I am, for better or worse, a gentleman. Of sorts.

Which is why we will not finish this here, on the couch, where I was too stupid to stash any lube.

He squeaks when I stand with us both, his legs wrapping around me automatically as I shift my arms until they are under him, holding him up. I want him to feel his smallness, another thing he cannot let himself feel, to feel his powerlessness and the erotic charge of it.

I want him to see it on my face and he does, cheeks burning as I walk forward, hips snuggled tightly against his.

He is small. He is mine. I am in control, and he cannot do a damn thing about it.

He does not want to, you see. Not now. Not leaking with need, my cock pressed against his, suspended in the air by my strength and the knowledge that I saw this in him, that I am about to give him what he would never have been able to ask for on his own.

I dropped him on the bed hard enough for a few good bounces and he stays there, watching me advance on the bed and tower over him for a moment, shirt and slacks wet, breath hard, the weight of my cock where it lies trapped against my hip a threat and a promise.

I undress myself, one slow button at a time, to let the heat rise between us, anticipation dancing into madness until I finally step out of the discarded pile of slacks and briefs.

The look on his face… the hopeless worship, the way he stares, openly drooling, at my cock, the way he looks as if he would drop to his knees at the first suggestion of it, the need… god, the need.

He starts to pant as I dig the lube from the bedside table. _Hungry little slut_ , I murmur, and he is too far gone to flinch.

He does not want to lie down on his back, but he does so, stiffness yielding again as I pull his thighs up and put them in his hands, to hold.

It is less comfortable, but I want to see his face as I slick up both hands until they are dripping, going back to the bundle of nerves beneath his ass and the ones between his thighs, slick pressure finding, circling, claiming them until they are awash in pleasure and he bites his lips, pupils blown open like a breached door.

And then I circle in, his muscles already slack and sending frantic messages up his nerves, coming fractionally closer to the fluttering ring of muscle that aches for me, exploring the taut skin around it until he makes a high pitched sob when I dip a finger inside him, too slick to be denied, inching forward little by little as it widens.

He would like to cry. He would like to babble, his lips writhing, eyes squeezed tight, toes curling in the air as his legs shake and I approve.

This is right. This is what I longed to see him do, this helpless hunger that boils his brain away to terrible need.

He slackens quickly for a virgin, eager, and I still haven’t shown him the full range of it, haven’t made him find god at the tip of my cock yet.

But he will. He’s about to find Jesus and hear the angels calling his name.

A second finger and his hips are moving, humping, begging for more sensation, and I wonder if he has imagined how this will feel, stretching himself with his thick fingers and pretending it was someone else.

I wonder if he has pretended it was me.

Very little time passes before I can get a third finger into him, and he’s shaking, spasming, finally babbling, moans interspersed with fractions of words.

God, cut into bits. Fuck, the first aspirated 'f' hissing. The name he knows to call me stretched out into a breathy scream.

I slick myself up with my free hand, unwilling to stop the sweet torture and let him cool from his white hot stupor. His ass is already at the edge of the bed, and I hold him open with two fingers as I slide myself in.

He pulsates around me, and it is all I can do not to join him. Instead, I dig my fingers into his hips, anchoring us both on the edge of passing out from it.

He sobs, his thighs coming down to cradle me, fingers knotted in the sheets, mouth open, the hoarse spit of please falling over and over from his swollen lips.

Christ, this.

This.

Oh god, this.

My toes are curled, too, feet arched with strain, thighs shaking the edge of my control, my fingers bruisingly tight on the bare shriek of his bones.

I can hear myself pant, and I bite the inside of my cheek, concentrating, before gently picking him up and scooting him ever so slightly forward, then down.

I can feel it there, a hard knot at the end of my cock, and he gasps, tears rising in his eyes.

Oh yes, he will find god.

I wrap a hand around his cock, the fever of it beggaring the heat of my fingers, and he tightens his thighs around me, instinct.

His eyes are wide, cheeks red in a hard spot high up, under his eyes. He is soaking wet with sweat, nipples two tight brown beads on his chest, cock nearly purple and dribbling a sticky stream down my fingers.

Perfect, this moment. We will both remember this.

With a gentle surge of my hips, I introduce him to a new religion, and he howls my praise until he passes out, voice shredded to a croaking whisper.  I bundle us both onto the bed and fall asleep with him tucked into the line of my body, my fingers curled possessively around his cock.

He’s going to wake up embarrassed. He’s going to wake up wondering if he’s still the man he was.

And I’m going to wake up and fuck him until he stops worrying about it.


	3. The Heavy

There is nothing in the world like climbing a tall man and conquering him, sweat-sticky and crowing with the fine rush of your blood in your veins, body singing with tension and lit up like a whole forest on fire after the lightning rakes it with the hammer of god.

We’ve made a joke of it, he and I, his massive frame more than a foot taller than mine, the wedge of his torso wider than my body curled, fetal, around it, my great bear, the mountain that I scale naked, eager, nails raking furrows in his rocky back.

Sometimes, he forgets that I am not as fragile as I appear. Everyone is fragile compared to him, and he whispers as if he is afraid I would break at the sound of his voice, the gut-tightening rumble of testosterone that immediately sticks my panties to me and makes my hips feel as if they were made of a blood-hot liquid that flows bonelessly toward him.

He forgets and comes gentle, fingers tentative where they brush my shoulder, yearning curling his lips up at the corners, as he calls the name he has given me, _kotyonok_ , his little kitten, something to be protected, cherished, guarded in his way from an unfriendly world.

How endearing he can be, and how utterly frustrating at moments like these, his natural deference for women making him act as if I would shatter if he showed me even the smallest hint of what he feels for me.

To punish, but not really, I pretend not to hear him, eyes shrouded by my lashes to hide the searching look I pour over him, sniffing and turning away as a game that he knows I play when I want him to woo me, passionately, over some small and occasionally imagined wrong.

What can I say? I love to stir him.

And taking his cue, he sweeps me up easily, a bundle in his arms, and I squawk and very gently slap his thick arm. I can feel his laughter like an earthquake in the broad pillar of his body, words in Russian I do not yet know murmured with affection and frustration, and I must resist the urge to curl up against his chest, safe as I wish I had been when I was a child.

He shifts until I have to do it, my ear pressed to his chest to hear the creak of his tendons as he walks to the bedroom, his voice a tectonic shift, a force of nature contained in flesh and bone.

I cannot keep myself from closing my eyes, to hear better, to feel him more closely, the warmth of his body leeching into me and sapping away the slightest hint of tension. The man is just terrible that way, the smell of his chest making me think of home, of safety and the need to be close, a strange and intoxicating mix of yearning and lust.

I grunt, nuzzling him, before I can stop myself.

I don’t have to look at his face to feel his pleased grin, that son of a bitch.

He puts me down on the bed so gently, oh so gently, a wry grin on his face because he knows this is not how I like him best, not this too soft treatment that will make me ask for more, in the wordless way we ask each other. He’s going to ask, the way he does, kneeling carefully on the floor, huge fingers making short work of the hem on my shirt, eyes rolled up with a merry spite that comes from knowing me just that well.

He’s a terrible tease, in his quiet way.

I won’t oblige him. I won’t, and the fact that I’ve bitten my lower lip is just coincidence, not the effect he has when he breathes on the bare skin of my stomach, the shocking warmth of it invading me with the memory of his hands, his mouth, the nearly tearing weight of him in me.

My nipples harden painfully, going from soft to a pair of very visible signs that he has a certain effect, the great, shaven weight of his head just close enough to raise the fine hairs on my body, reaching into the distance between us.

He is huge. Ridiculously huge, everything on him exaggerated until just looking at him starts a dull burn deep inside me, anticipating what happens in even the gentlest of fucks. He knows I like that, the burn of his body in mine, devastating, the feel of him finally letting himself fuck the way he likes to, the feel of my body helpless and unable to do anything but howl in the violence of my pleasure.

The look on his face is downright cocky, thick eyebrows raised, the rim of his lower lip crinkled and curved in amusement. He won’t tell me what he says at moments like these, his tone proud and purring, but I’m pretty sure it’s filthy, whatever it is.

He is cocky but equally eager to please. He knows he’s going to have to please me before he can get anywhere near me because I like pain, but he was not made for fucking anyone as short as me without preparation.

He likes to please, one part reassurance and another insurance, not that he needs it. That goddamn bastard is so sweet that it makes my teeth hurt, but I’m not stupid enough to walk away.

I roll my eyes at him, leaning back on my hands, daring him to keep going and he does, the rasp of his stubble on me a counterpart to the wet heat of his mouth.

He’s doing it again, that thing where he appears to zero in like magic on places that shimmer between ticklish and pleasure, and turn me into a puddle on his bed. I swear he practices it, or maybe he’s just that good at body language, or has that much practice, or perhaps he just memorizes that places that make me buck against his mouth, a line of kisses that skim the waist of my pants, the look in his eyes growing earnest in that way he does, begging without words to strip me bare and tiny in his arms, to see one more time what he can do.

I should put him off. I should. I should make him work harder for it, but I just can’t pretend that I’m not already wet, breath short, the muscles of my stomach shaking with the memory of his body above mine.

That smug grin is back, his hands sure where they peel the jeans from me, leaving my underwear on and translucent with moisture, haloing the thick lips beneath them, naked.

He looks down, pupils wide and dark, voice dropping until it is barely audible, and he’s killing me, that look on his face and the air between us that is so very full of his lack, of the fact that he’s not touching me.

When I sit up, reaching for him, he growls and pushes me back down, and my god the strength of him makes me throb, muscles inside me outlined in aching relief, emptiness boiling my blood away as if I will die if he does not close that space between us.

His face, oh yes, the arrogance and the need in it, the patience that I can see practically evaporating as I writhe, hips coming up off the bed in a wave to point the emptiest part of me at him, perfuming the air with need.

He is trying to be impassive, to hide behind discipline, and I will not have it. He may have pushed my shoulders down, but he did nothing about my legs, thick with muscle and now coiled around him, pulling him in with a challenge shouted into the still air of his room.

No.

No.

He’s not going to try and keep some part of himself away from this. If he doesn’t fuck me until I can’t walk right tomorrow, I’m going to burst into tears, every pore in my body weeping with me.

I know he meant to eat me until I had gone out of my skin, until there was nothing left of me but a reflecting pool filled with honey spilling out over his bed, but he does not need to bother. I can harvest pain for pleasure easily when I'm like this, can harvest it out of almost anything, even what he is doing now.

How careful he is.

How goddamn, cruelly careful.

There are tears in my eyes. I’ve bitten an errant wrinkle in the cover because I am empty beyond bearing and he’s still hovering above me, deciding at a moment like this, still thinking as if I am made of glass and he will shatter me if he does what I will go mad if he does not, my chest shaking with a sob.

Oh, there is something finer than sadism in him, in the fact that he would pause at a moment like this and does not know how much worse it makes the burning sweetness beneath my skin, head tossing from side to side, seeking, the hoarse alto of my voice rising and falling in tears.

I think he enjoys it, though he’d deny it if asked, the effect he has on me, the seismic rupture in my world and the way he can reduce me to mindless babbling by simply refusing to finish, let alone the way he turns me into a puppet, unable to do anything but feel the rush of pleasure eating through me as I pray to dissolve.

I can hear him breathing, the hitch in it that tells me he can feel it too, a need higher than any drug I have ever tried.

Memory is the drug, the memory of what we have done to each other, his face in slivers, closed eyes, sweat, hungry, gasping, every nerve in my body lined in fire. Better, every time better than the last, the memory of us burning through my body like a fuse.

My god, if someone had told me this man would have had this effect on me, I’d have laughed at them.

 _Laughed_.

Who can claim to predict this kind of alchemy?

The bed dips as he stands, pulling away from my thighs, and I can hear his clothes slither to the floor. If he had indicated the slightest desire for it, I would be on my knees, lips pressed to his feet and waiting to spring up, wrap myself around him and climb, reaching together for the timeless storm of heaven.

I wonder what he sees when I’m like this, the veins behind my eyelids pulsing colors that don’t exist outside them, halos and the tongue of angels lapping inhuman and pristine into the twisted surface of my mind.

Russian again, words I do not understand, hands gentle and persistent as he pulls the soaked shield of my panties from me.

I obey, I do.

Shoulders pressed to the bed.

Oh, I obey, a moan breaking out of me that I cannot help, cannot suffocate. I am going to die if he doesn’t…

If he doesn’t do what he does, easing into me with the same delicacy that is that much more horrible because it is kind, because it is gentle and at odds with my need to rake him bloody from the way he splits me open, the glorious mindlessness of prophets and the possessed. If he could open me like a door and step inside, we couldn’t be close enough to take the gilt from this, the golden rush that is drowning me.

And fuck, he moves so small, so considerate, that arrogant smile back on his face at the sight of me, tiny and obscenely spitted on him, so displaced by his cock that he can see the skin of my stomach tented as he surges forward, still too slow and kind and I am too full to breathe.

I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if I obey, if he is disappointed or if I can’t breathe. He can fucking kill me if he wants to, as long as he keeps doing what he’s doing, gutting me on his sheets.

I need to devastate him, need to feel him dying with me, and I reach up to dig my nails into his tree trunk arms, to draw blood as he draws blood in me.

And he likes that, he does, seeing me gasping, red-faced, raking the agonizing cost of pleasure on him, unable to stay still, rolling from side to side, a puppet he has filled entirely.

God, I can’t even keep fucking myself on him. My knees are shuddering, convulsing, and he’s barely started. I can feel the orgasm getting ready to sucker punch me, rising through my spine like a knife and severing thought from the maelstrom.

Oh, but it’s not enough yet. It’s never enough, and he flips us both over easily, making me ride him, working like an athlete to say upright and conscious.

Sweet torture, every muscle in my body fighting to rock forward and back. If a stranger had marched into the room and told me I was about to be killed, if the house was on fire, I could not do anything more than this, my fingers raking furrows in his chest, fighting with every cell in my body against the tunnel of oblivion that gathers at the corners of my vision.

He may actually make me faint like this, but god, what a way to go.

He moves with me now, forgetting to be gentle and kind, and it burns so far inside me that I don’t know where he stops, whimpers rising out of me like a hymn of praise for what this is, whatever this is.

I mean, every time, to climb him and remain aloof, focused, to show him that I could be as impassive as he seems sometimes, but I just can’t do anything but climb, swaying, sweat spattering from the ends of my hair, fire spreading through my chest, determined to keep climbing as my vision is veined in red, his hands finally curling around me to hold me up because I am going to faint here, like this, hanging right on the edge where the roar of my muscles and pain becomes more potent than heroin.

I would belly-crawl through glass for it, for this, and I will never tell him.

I will pray he never knows.

I am going to faint before it hits me, I swear, hanging just outside my reach as if god himself has come down to torture me with it.

His hands. His huge hands.

Holding me up.

Holding me tight.

Holding me down to the earth, holding me to consciousness where I cling, beyond words when it hits me and my scream rises into inaudibility, vision strobing with a starry night, supernovas and black holes sucking me down and out and inside out, screaming in his face, blood painting my fingertips and pattering on the bed as he bellows with me, his face in mine, purple with strain, veins like snakes writhing beneath the skin of his forehead, boiling heat spurting inside me.

After that, even the pain that elbows its way rudely into my consciousness as I come down is enough, with a few quick strokes, to send me up again, flying out of my skin as he watches, face contorted and birth-wet.

My god, he fucks me into a new woman every night, his exhausted laugh wrung out and satisfied.

 _Kitten_ , he rumbles. _Are okay_?

I press my forehead to his chest, unable to speak, but I would kill to keep him in me, glued together with sweat and come, just a few more minutes joined together so deep and close that I can feel his pulse like my own, as if I had slipped inside his skin.

He understands, I think, in his own way, that it is more painful to let him slide out of me than it is to stay here, utterly filled and burning.

 _Kitten_ , he rumbles, stroking the hair from my face.

If I were not disjointed like a piece of meat, I would start again, hips moving atop him, coaxing him up one more time and rushing recklessly over the border of pain for the shining treasure I know waits for me inside it.

He worries about me, his delicate little kitten, worries that he will hurt me.

And he does. He will.

I could not be more grateful.


	4. The Scout

The Scout never has more kneecaps than when he’s sitting on my lap, his coltish legs seeming to multiply, long arms moving restlessly, squirming as if he were not a tall, leggy blonde man, shaped by running into a sculpture of warm spring steel.

It’s very, very hard not to smile at him, at my lap full of sun-kissed, lightly salty man, smelling the way he does of grass, sweat, and musk, the broad nasal burr of his accent making his demands stretch out to forever.

 _Com’onnnnn_ , he whines as I firmly pull his bandaged hand away from my cock. _Fuuuuuck. Pleeease._

Bratty boy, last of seven, always desperate for attention, brash and shouting, trumpeting _look at me_ and dashing into things foolish and dangerous for the balm of praise.

I could dare him to do anything and he might try it, just to spite me and see if he could, if I would praise him for it. Just to see if I would catch him, would reel him back in, to see if I am still watching, if I still care.

Because I moved his hands, he switches tactics, turning in my lap until I cannot read the newspaper and his taut ass is snuggled in as close as possible to the button fly of my pajamas, the thin fabric of his running shorts slick and completely without the lines of underwear.

He is being so goddamn bad right now that I have to re-file my taxes in my head not to bend him over the table and paddle his ass until he giggles, kicking, the sting of my hand flipping magically from pain to something he says is very like a tickle.

He went running in those shorts, no underwear, the legs short enough, if they were tighter, to be briefs.

The neighbors are going to say something about it, not that I blame them. I love fucking the boy, but no one is prepared to see side dick at 5 am, not even me.

And now he’s humping me, lower lip caught in his teeth, looking over his shoulder and wind-breaker to see the effect.

I really should keep drinking my coffee, pretend that I don’t notice the way his cheeks part around me and the fact that I’m hard now. I should reach past him, pick my newspaper back up, and go back to looking at stock performance.

I’m morbidly curious to see if he can get me off this way without my face changing, a punishment for scandalizing the neighbors and practically ripping my paper out of my hands.

I really should.

But he smells like sweat, like grass, like musk, his body still glistening from the run, the too thin fabric of those damn shorts and my pajamas doing nothing to block the heat, the silky texture of the skin between his cheeks, stroking me, his legs straddling me and working, hips undulating in a way I know from experience he can keep up for hours.

Runners.

Fuck it. I was done with my coffee, anyway.

Two different bodies, his and mine—the wiry frame of a runner and the thicker build of a weightlifter, a little gift from my German father. I can’t outrun him, but I can do what I do now, scoop him up and pin his flexible knees to his chest.

He says something smug that I’m ignoring for now, because we still haven’t resolved his behavior at the table. And really, I should punish him there, but what a sexy little bundle he makes in the mirror when I hold him like this, the bathroom counter perfect to let him brace his hands, letting me fuck him just a little longer like that.

But I’m spanking him first, the little shit.

I love the bathroom, the wide mirror that covers a whole side of the room, and the counter in front of it. It’s a beautiful room even without what I like to do in it, windows high and graced with stained glass, dappling the room in color.

When I put him down he spins, coquettish, a flirty little look that makes him popular when he can entice me out to a nightclub.

God help me, I’m having trouble holding the stern look on my face.

Taxes. Taxes and the current value of the house. Strength, man.

I’m chiding myself and it works, letting me settle the demand back on my face.

He’s going to get it this time.

 _Take your fucking clothes off_ , I bark. _Everything but those goddamn shorts_.

I don’t have to tell him twice. It takes him less than a second to jerk his wind-breaker over his head, the plasticky fabric whispering and quickly joined by his t-shirt. His shoes get kicked off, one flying past my ear, and his socks join them, letting him flex the tight tendons of his feet against the tile floor.

His hair is still wet, droplets of sweat still clinging to the scant body hair he makes, a droplet traveling the fine-boned curve of his chest.

He knows how I feel about that, about seeing him flushed and wet with exercise, and the way he smells.

I like him best when he doesn’t bother to wear deodorant, just comes in from the run smelling like himself.

I adjust my glasses for a moment, buying myself time to be composed again. He leans back against the counter, then crosses his arms.

A thrill runs through me. This little game is as much for me as him, and nothing makes me harder than punishing him when he’s like this, then fucking him speechless.

He knows that, of course.

When I don’t say anything, he bends over and waggles his ass at me, pouring fire through my veins.

A step brings me to him, the inch difference between us exaggerated by the fact that he’s bent, making me seem even taller. He’s up on his tip-toes, his smooth, tight ass working and visible through the loose legs of those bloody shorts.

It pays to have calluses at moments like this, the slap of my hand lifting him off his feet and forcing him to catch himself on the counter. He was anticipating something, goading it from me, but he wasn’t expecting this.

His eyes are wide in the mirror, motor mouth loose.

I slap his ass again, catching the sensitive skin under it that the shorts cannot shield. Again and again, one side and then the next, on the sensitive skin that hangs right out of those shorts, the mirror letting him see my face and letting me see his as I punish the skin that I’m going to be explaining to the neighbors later.

I think he’d like to think of himself as a bit stoic, but only because I usually let him.

Not now. He squeals, finally squirming, his ass a deep hot red, but we’re not done until he finally starts crying, his face in the mirror clear to us both, snot and tears and drool running down it to drip on the counter.

Mirrors are simply fantastic tools for punishment, because he is entranced by it, by the mess of his face and the sight of me behind him, my arm swinging like a pendulum while the other rests on his lower back, holding him down to the counter.

They’re fantastic tools on the other side of our little equation as well. I don’t miss a thing in his expression, from the mulish defiance that starts with his lip out and ends like this, with him trying not to sniffle, glassy-eyed and boyish.

He’s begged. He’s pleaded. He’s tried to make deals, does every time, but he knows he’s not getting out of this.

Believe it or not, it comforts him to know it, to know that I’m paying attention and that he can’t get out it.

When I stop, his legs have a little tremor in them, the shorts pulled tight and bowing out in the front.

I’ve been tented since he started humping me at the breakfast table.

I jerk the shorts from him, making him gasp, and shove them in his mouth with a growl he knows means to keep them in.

He’s already bending his knees, spread open and anticipating.

It makes me smile, a quick half-expression that fades quickly into intent. I roll my pajamas down quickly and step out of them.

I like preparing him, how hungry he gets and how he chases my fingers but cannot get them until I give them to him, until I choose to give them back. That little tremor is back in his knee, and he’s even quicker than usual to open up, the muscles in his jaw and thighs standing out in sharp relief where he bites those goddamn shorts and fights himself to stay still, to wait.

He bites down harder as I slick myself up, squirting a healthy stream into him directly and wiping my hands dry on the towel. A quick move and I put him up on the counter, on all fours for now, just until I’m seated deep in him.

He is just as gloriously slick and tight as he looks, just loose enough to let me fight my way into him, pulsating around me the way he knows I like.

From there, a quick scoop puts him up in my arms, his body pinned against mine and his knees flat against his chest.

It’s obscene, the sight of him butterflied and spitted on me, unable to touch the ground or himself, the thick meat of my cock just visible where his ass is split open. One look at his face tells me that he is flying, glassy and bright, the hem of his shorts peeking out from between his lips, nose flared as he pants into them.

I can’t thrust long this way, but I can thrust in little movements that just remind him how deep I am, his ass scaldingly hot around me, the great vein of my cock playing in and out as I move and he starts to pulse for real, little involuntary spasms that he can’t control.

Fuck, the picture it makes when I fuck him like this, his delicate body against my larger one, hairy and thick, my arms engulfing him, the small tight, hairless globes of his ass parted and red, asshole stretching with me as I move, sucking at me.

He makes a gurgling sound, eyes wide, looking at himself, unable to look away or even to blink.

I growl in his ears that he’s a bad little boy, daddy’s bad little boy, voice ragged with the strain and the sight and the orgasm coming on like a fucking truck.

Fuck it. I had more planned, but there’s no goddamn way I’m going to last with his ass rippling around me, little inarticulate groans muffled by those shorts, his hands in fists, shake in his knees threatening to make me drop him, the lost look on his face and the purpled, drooling head of his cock bobbing with every thrust.

I come just before he does, roar echoing off the tile walls, veins of my neck standing out like cords with the need to throw my head back, but I don’t want to miss the sight of him tensing, rigid for just a moment as his ass clamps down on me, then going boneless as my cock pistons in and out of him with a slurp, the come oozing out of him and down me.

I let his legs down and bend over him to grab the counter, waiting to be able to breathe again and still watching his face in the mirror, the blissful, unfocused look in his eyes above the shorts he still has in his mouth.

My knees want to collapse and I have to lock them, still buried inside him, nerves electric and warm.

He’s so good at this, his ass so perfectly tight and then open around me, his first startled reaction to being called my little boy pouring gasoline on what was already a bonfire. He’s so good at provoking me, so good at wriggling beneath my guard, so good at moments like these when I can see I’ve fucked him stupid, so open and willing to show me the blissful expression on his face.

I reach forward, shifting slightly, and he murmurs a complaint, made clearer by the fact that I’ve pulled the shorts out of his mouth, shaking them in front of his eyes with a weary, stern expression.

I don’t have the breath to lecture, not now.

The shorts fall to the floor with a splat.

I don’t want to slide out of him just yet, a small twitch of my hips riding the line between good and too much. A few minutes longer like this and I’ll get hard again.

But this time, he’s doing the fucking work.


	5. The Spy

First impressions of him are a doozy—his elegant face, patrician nose with its slight downward hook, wings of salt in his black hair, dark eyes over high cheekbones, one or two spots like ink breaking the faintly tanned expanse of his skin.

He looks like he should be bidding on something at Christie’s, the raw linen of his slacks a rich, velvety blue beneath a cotton shirt so fine it resembles silk.

He does not look like he should be here, chatting easily with my pimp in a nightclub near a naval base, her dyed blonde hair bobbing as he charms her into giving him way too much time for probably way too little money.

It’s not like her to give a discount but by the look of things, he could talk the birds out of the trees and into human jobs so they can buy a timeshare condo. I watch people a lot, and he is a rare kind of person indeed, the force of his personality making it difficult to tell him no.

I don’t like that about him. Sometimes clients get ambitious, trying to push themselves into something more personal than the service I’m prepared to give, and his smooth application of charm makes him an experienced pro at getting what he wants.

He casually shakes her hand, leaving a thick stack of bills that she makes disappear—if that’s as much as I think it is, he’s just bought my time for the whole night. My pimp grins at me over his shoulder, faint blush burning visibly beneath her thick foundation and gives me two thumbs up. She’s thrilled.

I’m not so sure. The money is certainly right, but the man may not be. This is a job, a job that I like sometimes, but still just a job that I like to leave, go home, and put away. I have no desire to have to defend myself all night long from probing attempts to get inside my professional face and try to get to know the “woman within” or whatever nonsense the client happens to believe.

He’s close enough to smell now, and he smells like independent wealth or a really generous expense account—pepper, citrus, cedar, and something else that I’m not entirely sure of. The whole thing together is… well, it’s seductive. Money is seductive.

He’s watching me patiently, one hand on his hip for all the world like he’s posing for my benefit. When I look at his hand, he crooks his elbow, putting it out for me to slip my arm through his, the look on his face more neutral than pleased.

I’m fairly sure he’s watching me back, which really makes him dangerous.

Why can’t he just be interested in a fuck, come and leave?

But I’m a pro, so I link my arm through his and smile up at him, a vacuously pleasant expression that appears to amuse him.

We clack together out of the club, his long stride slowed to let me keep up in my hooker heels, the criss-crossing straps already biting my feet.

A block down, he leads me into one of the many sex shops that line this area.

I could get lucky. He could just want to watch some porn in a booth, want a little company and a bit of service, and be too distracted to play mind games. The clerk behind the counter eyes me with a hint of disgust, able to make me instantly from the ridiculously tawdry outfit I wear because most people are subtle like a sledgehammer, and drunk sailors are especially dense.

Call leopard print tacky if you like, but it gets the job done.

The selections he makes start to startle me after the first few aisles—condoms and lube are to be expected, but a harness and cock, a length of braided silk rope, a flogger—this client is apparently not fucking around. By the time he’s done, there’s a significant pile on the counter that I lean against, watching him test a crop with his hands and add it. The clerk and I both are astounded at this point, at the total which comes to over a grand, easily, when he buys the clerk’s duffel bag and makes him empty it out on the floor around his feet.

He swings the heavy bag over his shoulder with a grunt or any sign of effort, and it scares me a little—I would have guessed his strength to be mostly the wiry brand his body seems to match. If he can swing sixty pounds of leather gear and accessories over his shoulder without so much as taking a breath, he’s a damn sight more fit than I thought.

I can bottom, but I prefer to bottom for someone who gets tired after a few minutes and expects me to compliment their manhood for the rest of the hour. I do not prefer to bottom for someone who can fuck the whole time because this is, as I keep reminding people, a job and not a hobby.

He signals for a taxi and they stop for him, of course, reeking as he does of money. For me, dressed like this, they would have kept driving.

The hotel he directs us to is the one I expected—a hopped-up tourist joint with a Michelin-starred restaurant and a policy about people like me that makes the doorman’s face go scarlet as the client leads me up the stairs. I can tell he’d like to say no, but the expression on the client’s face is downright terrifying, making me pull back slightly against his hand.

Instead, the doorman holds the door open, muttering something underneath his breath, and the client looks back at me, smiling apologetically.

I follow, eyes searching him from the crown of his head to the bulge of his wallet, then down to the tailored shoes on his feet. He doesn’t appear to be armed, but he is certainly familiar with violence and the fine art of intimidation. He’s scarier than my pimp’s boyfriend: oversized, tattooed and terrifying, he’s usually who we call if a date goes bad.

The clerks eye us, and like the doorman one moves forward, hand up to stop us before withering under the look the client aims at him.

We sweep up the stairs to a bank of elevators.

All right, I admit it, I’m a little giddy. The nightly cost of this hotel is definitely not cheap, nor was bag he emptied that sex shop into. The stack of cash he handed my pimp should put six hundred in my hands at the end of the night. Not an incredible amount of money, but it will do a good job of paying my bills.

He punches the button for the penthouse and I have to re-evaluate him—the penthouse in this hotel goes for eight hundred dollars a night at the least. There ain’t many of us who’ve made it up here, and it’s dizzying to ride the elevator to the top with someone who can force the hotel to treat me like a guest. I fan my face and flirt, and he merely shrugs as if spending this much money is just something he does.

I’m starting to get the impression this client is not the empty babble type—“what a big cock you have, daddy,” and a fairly good imitation of an orgasm, all the little tricks clients expect us to use on them to make them feel as if they might just be ten feet tall and full of sexual rapture.

More mind games then, I suppose.

I sigh before I can stop myself. I can patter what my dad used to call a blue streak, mouth moving convincingly without bothering to think, and most people are content with that, able to convince themselves that it just might be sincere for them, just them.

That’s what they’re paying me for, to convince them they’re special, they’re not like my other clients.

What is he paying me for?

The elevator dings, opening into a small and very quiet hall, the six doors like a sign for everyone to read: this space is too good for you, for us to be crammed in end to end like the poor bastards on the floors beneath us.

He fumbles in his pocket and opens the second door from the right, then motions me in. I’ve never been in a room like this—open space and a sunken couch in a circle around a fireplace, a wet bar, something I’ve only ever seen in movies, a hot tub in front of huge, pristine windows that look down on the city, making all the little grimy streets spread out like a glittering blanket, interrupted by the dark water.

He walks toward a door, what I assume is the bedroom, and drops the duffel bag just inside the door. Dusting his hands off, he comes back to me, looking down at me until I meet his eyes, torn away from the view.

 _Hungry_ , he says, his voice richer than it sounded in the club, a honey-smooth burr and purr.

If he took up phone sex, he’d be damn popular. With that thought, I give myself a little shake and nod.

I’m going to have to fight a little not to be seduced by the sheer amount of money he’s willing to throw at this, the way he smells and looks and the way his voice is pitched just perfectly for late nights and things you know are wrong, but feel very right.

He crosses the room and pulls a leather-bound menu from behind the phone, a great, burgundy rectangle that turns out to be full of wines and a language I don’t recognize. I can’t even find a burger in the fucking thing, the one thing I thought they’d have to have.

I’m not about to admit that I can’t read half the menu, let alone that it makes me feel terribly out of place. The whole room makes me feel out of place: the thick carpet, the huge flatscreen TV, the leather everywhere, the fireplace laid and ready to be lit, the wet bar made of some dark wood that looks obscene, the view out of the windows that makes me feel like I’ve stolen something, reminds me that I don’t belong here, looking down on the city.

I don’t look down on the city. It looks down on me, every last asshole in it.

He blinks once, muttering something in a language I don’t know, and asks me, with strangely old-fashioned courtesy, if he could possibly make me a few recommendations. I let him have the menu carelessly, hiding my anger at the whole goddamn thing—the fact that he can’t just get it over with and the fact that with nothing more than a visit to a hotel room, he has made me feel small and ugly and incredibly… Incredibly poor.

Shithead.

But what a view. I cross the room to look out those windows, the city glittering like a dream, lights smearing across the bay.

Behind me, he calls the hotel kitchen, murmuring into the phone before hanging it up and joining me at the window.

I was waiting for him to wrap his arms around me, to pretend the way most people like to pretend that I’m here as his date, because I want him. Instead, he stands beside me, resting a hand on the window and studying the twinkle of the lights.

His other hand rises and runs through his hair, mussing it back and forth as if he is thinking about something and this is his habit.

When I turn toward him he smiles once at me, almost apologetically and goes back to watching the window, the neutrality slowly draining from his face and leaving something softer.

He’s really not acting like I thought he would, which makes me a little nervous. I still don’t think he’s dangerous exactly, but he sure isn’t treating this like the business it is.

He also hasn’t probed at me yet, hasn’t tried to ham-handedly convince me that his dick is the cure for my job and all my ills, which is pretty much what people do if they don’t treat this like business.

He leans forward and presses his forehead to the glass, then sighs heavily, eyes closed.

I’m curious, I suppose, but he doesn’t seem like he particularly wants to talk, so after a few minutes of watching him, I sit down on the couch, suppressing a groan at the pleasure of taking my weight off those stupid goddamn heels.

Another moment and he pushes himself away from the window, leaving streaks on the glass. When he crosses back to me, his eyes are focused again. Watching me.

That’s a damn intense expression, and it gives me the goose bumps. His eyes dip briefly, noticing it, before snapping back to my face.

I brace myself for business. It’s a very recognizable look, that one.

He doesn’t say anything, just stops in front of me before bending down to pick up one of my calves. I can’t stop myself from tensing, because once again he’s being… well, he’s being weird.

He turns me with it and sits down on the couch, pulling my leg into his lap, careless of the mud it leaves on his beautiful slacks.

Maybe he’s the seducing type, the kind of man who wants to slowly undress you. I lean slightly, giving him slightly better access to the extremely small panties that lurk under my dress. His eyes flash over to me, amused, but he ignores that part of me otherwise.

Instead, the son of a bitch unbuckles my shoes and pulls them from my feet slowly, working the straps out of the red grooves they’ve worn in my feet.

All right, maybe he’s got a foot fetish.

He doesn’t sniff them, or bring my feet to his cock, or drop them in favor of my shoes. Instead, his eyebrows twitch, coming together, and he starts to very gently probe my feet with his fingers, finding all the knots, the over-tight muscles in my calves that make me hobble for an hour after I take the shoes off.

And then, without comment or looking at me to see the effect, he starts to rub.

This is way over the line into boyfriend territory, way past client and into something more personal, and I would stop him but goddamn he’s good at finding knots and rubbing them into submission, his broad thumbs refusing to give, or release, or even to go away until the muscle gives up and lets go.

All right, maybe he wants to pretend I am a girlfriend after all. I can play along.

He really is good at this, his hands sending wave after wave of warmth up my legs and back, where it seems to collect behind my eyelids in a silky weight. It’s not hard to let myself sag back on the cushions and watch him, fighting the urge to close my eyes and let him keep turning me into a puddle.

His hands are apparently tireless, and despite myself that’s the first thing that starts a liquid warmth between my legs, the way they keep moving, keep finding knots and fighting them into smoothness without having to pause, to shake his hands or flex them anymore than he does rubbing patiently, persistently.

He’s going to put me to sleep if I don’t stop him, so I pull my legs back, the skin humming with regret.

His expression is wry, as if I’ve caught him doing something he shouldn’t, and my eyes narrow. More mind games, just a more sophisticated kind than people normally play.

I resent that, the fact that he’s going there and the fact that he caught me just a little bit.

All right, maybe more than a little bit.

I tuck my feet under myself and glare at him. He sighs and turns toward me, hitching an elbow over the back of the couch.

 _Would you like a fire_ , he says in his voice of caramel and sex.

When I nod he turns toward the fireplace, efficiently lighting the small pyramid of tinder in its center and flicking a switch on its side. It takes very little time for the fire to catch, the fans on the hanging vent hood kicking on with a faint whir.

He leans back again, hitching both elbows over the couch and staring into the fire.

He still isn’t acting like a client. This still stinks like something that isn’t quite business or pleasure, and yet another attempt to save me from myself. If I have to, I can get this party started all by my lonesome, coming up on my knees on the couch before walking over on them and slinging a thigh over his lap.

He looks up at me, an eyebrow cocked. _So quickly_ , he says, a sly note of mockery in his tone, and I have to resist the urge to slap him for being so goddamn difficult.

When I lean in for a kiss, his elbows stay hooked on the couch back as if he is merely obliging me, doing me a favor by letting me kiss him, and his mouth is tepid at best.

It’s pissing me off. No matter how much money he’s spent here, he hasn’t paid enough to keep acting like this, to keep pushing the whole thing out of the nice, safe, familiar pattern of most of my outcalls.

So I bite him. I shouldn’t, but he’s annoying the shit out of me, and I just want this to be done.

He responds to that, his arms curving around me and jiggling his knees until he’s bouncing me like a child on his lap.

 _Better_ , he asks, voice skipping with a laugh, a great buttery thing that hangs in the air between us.

I want to bite him again for it, but I’m starting to feel ridiculous. When I try to stand, his arms tighten and I glare down at him.

His head is cocked, eyes checking and rechecking my face. The crimson blot of my lipstick on his shoulder has ruined his shirt, not that he appears to care.

 _You can_ , he finally says, _if you like_ , and he turns his head to bare his neck. When I don’t bite him again he sighs and looks back up at me.

 _I’m sorry_ , he says, voice low and vibrating the pocket of air between us. _I know I’m being very provoking_.

No shit.

 _What do you want_ , I ask, and I can feel the petulant expression on my face that I’ve been told will eventually turn into wrinkles.

His wry little smile is back, and his arms loosen, letting me stand up.

 _Company_ , he responds, leaving his lap an invitation for me to take up or not and looking up at me with something very naked in his face. A kind of self-mocking sadness, or maybe just loneliness.

I hate it when they do this, but it’s very common, this weird urge to turn my hooker ass into a therapist. I suppose listening is less effort than fucking them, but they always have expectations afterward, as if talking about their feelings has somehow turned this into a relationship, as if I think of them when they aren’t around the way they think about me, obsessed and possessive.

His expression changes, one side of his mouth crooking up, and he sighs.

 _Oui_ , he says, _I know what usually happens when men are like this. I can assure you that I will not expect you to think of me when I am not here. I do not expect to own you after a conversation_.

We are way the fuck out of client territory here, and I am well beyond annoyed. That little sentence right there tells me that either he makes a habit of trying to seduce working girls, or he’s got a cold read that puts him in a fairly elite group of conmen.

Either way, he’s trouble, and I am not being paid enough for this bullshit. I grab my heels and turn toward the door. When I reach it, he speaks again, the words falling into the expensive silence of the penthouse.

 _I have been you, once. Some time ago_.

That stops me, heels slung over my shoulder, purse tight under my arm. There are plenty of male hustlers out there, but they don’t usually come back, and no one I’ve ever heard of comes back like this, wealthy and looking for someone from their old life.

He’s still on the couch when I turn back, looking at me, his arms spread wide and plastering his shirt to his chest.

He certainly could have been. He’s a pretty man, and his voice and the kind of presence he has would have made it easier for him to find a sugar daddy, or whatever it is that he called it. And he knows way too much about how to present himself, how to make himself look good, not to have made his living at it, at some point.

 _All right_ , I say, leaning back against the door. _How about you tell me what you really want_?

He looks me up and down with a much more familiar heat, the kind of greedy accounting I know how to manage.

 _A bit of that_ , he murmurs, _and some conversation. I am lonely_.

I chew my lower lip. I really should leave. He’s way too good at pushing my boundaries to be trustworthy, and the conversation is very likely to tip over into territory he’ll feel obliged to be possessive about.

But if he’s been one of us, he knows how to hold that part of himself back.

And this has been a hell of a lot of money.

 _If_ , I say, letting the world spool out for longer than it should, _if I stay, you’ll stop trying to be a boyfriend_.

 _M’dmoiselle_ , he drawls, _I don’t want to be your boyfriend. But I won’t stop wanting to make you moan_.

Oh, he’s good. My nipples go diamond-hard and his words puddle inside me, making me feel like so much warm goo. He ain’t getting it on the house, but he may get a good fuck out of me if he keeps it up.

A knock behind me interrupts the heat between us and I turn around, letting room service wheel a heavily loaded cart into the room. He must have ordered at least one of everything. The cart is loaded from top to bottom, the tablecloth tucked up to show us the loaded trays stacked beneath it.

The man delivering the tray leaves with a hundred dollar bill tucked into his pocket, my client’s hands lingering a little longer than necessary and patting his chest. I close the door behind him with a teasing grin—my client is obviously not straight, not that I mind.

He is interesting, his demeanor going from mystery to filth to smooth amusement and back like a whiplash, the change barely visible. He helps me wrestle the trays to the table, easily balancing them on his arms like someone who has waited tables.

Another little clue.

It’s all good, not that I let myself have more than a few bites. From the toe-curlingly dirty expression on his face and the heavy bag of toys waiting in the bedroom, I’m going to need to be able to move, not to be bloated.

But it is so good that it’s hard to leave the plates alone—creamy yellow sauces melting on steaks, bread thick with butter, salads with vegetables I don’t recognize, ten bottles of wine in every color they make, a plate with tiny wedges of cheese, a huge bowl of fruit, ripe to perfection.

I end my meal there, blissfully munching through a strawberry the size of my fist, tangy and sweet. It’s going to be damn hard to go back to Ramen after this, or beans, or any of the food I normally eat.

He stops early too, his hands slow to lay knife and fork across his plate.

An awkwardness between us, looking at each other over this ridiculous array of food, both wondering who will start it, who is expected to seduce whom in this overpriced hotel room.

He laughs, breaking the silence, and puts his napkin over his plate. _M’dmoiselle_ , he says, standing, and makes a curious little half-bow over his arm. _Would you join me_?

There’s something comic in it, those little, old-fashioned gestures at courtesy aimed at me. He reminds me of a much older relative, a grandfather or great uncle raised to much more formal manners than I ever learned.

And he’s poorly hiding a grin that makes his face look much younger, an infectious, feckless grin that I can feel rising on my face to match his.

So I take his arm and let him lead me into the bedroom, swinging me out like a dancer to sit on the bed.

 _A change_ , he says, voice dropping again into honey and smoldering heat, and I let myself lay back on my elbows to watch him.

His lips part once, slowly, tongue just touching the top of his mouth and sliding out to tap his upper lip as his hands move toward the buttons of his shirt.

He’s going to perform a strip tease for me, a first to see a man strip this way, with this conscious attention to the way he looks, his mouth opening and closing to make me notice his lower lip, how full it is and the way a lazy smile spreads like ink in the water, the first button whispering out of his shirt, movements graceful and measured as if he were dancing.

I find my eyes glued to the first hint of hair on his chest, one button after the next parting with a pop to lay inch after inch of his chest bare, the skin tan and tight over the wiry body I imagined, muscles sliding against each other in slow relief.

Yes, he’s done this before, and he’s damn good at it, building heat and hunger and curiosity as he bares himself an inch at a time, proportioned like a statue.

He very definitely pays attention to his body as if it were a tool he uses daily for something important, nails smooth and buffed, skin clear and obviously moisturized, his cologne hovering in the background like an unsubtle reminder of just how sexy he could be.

By the time he is naked, I can feel a flush, a companion to his, heating me from forehead to knees. His movements are measured, giving me time to appreciate the strength and control, the way he seems to glide forward like a tiger, menace and a terrible beauty, until his knees brush the bed between mine.

The faint gilding of sweat simply makes him shine. He is unselfconscious in his nudity, comfortable and very aware of the way I look at him, the way my eyes cling to his chest and follow it down to his cock, already stirring slightly.

 _My turn_ , I murmur, and he flows around me to take my place on the bed, propped up on his elbows.

A step back and I stand, eyes closed, remembering a song I have always loved, the achingly slow base perfect for this.

I take my hair out of its ugly ponytail, the one my pimp insists is the right kind of sexy and has always reminded me of elementary school.

I love to dance, have always loved to move the way I start moving, a slow start, one hip and then the other up a few inches and down, the movement gradually becoming more exaggerated until my torso ripples, a belly dancer’s brag that I can control these muscles too, my hair trailing in the air as I sway, letting the ripples become slower until I can grab the hem of the dress, each undulation pulling it up, bunching it in my hands until I lean forward, and with a writhe, it falls off.

He makes a little sound, a musical grunt of approval, and I trail my hands up my thighs as I stand, skimming the waves of my torso until I can reach my bra and unhook it, ripples again growing stronger as I shrug it off, still clasping my breasts to watch his eyes follow my hands as they ride the waves down and roll my panties away.

When I step out of them, he claps, the applause in his eyes longer and more sincere. He stands and we look at each other for a moment before he reels me in, both still breathing heavy.

His kiss is far, far too experienced, hands holding me just close enough to give me a quick thrill of fear and excitement as his mouth strokes, muscular and promising, but I can disrupt that as well, giving as good as he can, small waves stroking me against his cock where it lies trapped between us. I can feel him smiling against my mouth, and he works a hand free, fingertips just callused enough to raise bumps on my skin as he trails it up me and between us, toward but never quite touching my nipple.

I snort. I’ll let him play that game. I can play it too, and he knows to use pressure on the muscle under the breast and not on the tissue, waking the muscle into warmth.

He walks me backward to the bed without breaking the kiss or even appearing to open his eyes, but instead of easing me down onto it, he lays down, letting me tower over him.

Well that answers that question.

When I turn back toward the bag, he pulls a knee up, his clever fingers trailing over his torso and turning his nipples into pebbles on his chest.

The bag has everything I have ever used and a few things I’ve never tried—every way I’ve ever seen to make someone howl, and I intend to make him howl.

It’s not exactly a competition, or if it is, it’s one of the more fun kind, and I intend to win.

After a moment pawing through the bag, I make a small pile and carry it to the bed. A crop, a wicked little fiberglass cane, a flogger designed for his balls, a sinister-looking, blunt stainless steel hook, two lengths of woven silk rope, the harness and biggest cock he bought, the lube and a box of condoms.

He shivers when he sees it, licking his lower lip, still stroking idle circles on himself, body positioned to look like a particularly naughty painting. When I pull him to his feet he presents me with his fists, a question in his eyes.

Instead, I flip him around, unspooling the first rope.

The first few loops are easy, the rope becoming a cage on his torso, just tight enough to remind him it’s there but loose enough to let me slip a hand underneath it. Handles, at every angle on his torso I think I might need.

He looks elegant in it, but he’d probably look elegant in a mud puddle.

The second rope, I knot through the hoop on the other end of the hook. He follows it with his eyes, a faint expression of worry crossing his face.

Appropriate, that.

He does not resist when I bend him over, feeding the rope under the cage wrapped around his body, but he tenses up when he hears the lube cap open with a crisp little snap. He flinches when I work some of it into him, and twitches when I slide the hook into his ass, sinking it in until the top can lay flat up his cheeks, the bend inside him and cupping him.

The rest of the rope gets a quick hitch until I can hold it over his shoulder, a quick tug making the hook rock inside him and making him gasp.

The expression on his face is more than mildly impressed, and I wonder if he asked my pimp about some of my hobbies before he paid for my time. If the two of us are going to get oddly personal, I have a lot of hobbies. I just almost never use them here.

When I sink down on the bed, the hook makes him follow me, sinking to his knees between my thighs.

How far is he willing to go?

For all he knows, I’ve been seeing clients all day.

He’s willing to go far enough. As his kiss promised, he is good at this as well, knowing to tease, to start slowly, savoring texture and flavor, coaxing the blood to the surface with the flat of his tongue and the tip, waiting for me to plump before licking harder as my eyes close despite myself.

He is damn good.

I rock the hook in him, making him exhale heavily into me, but he doesn’t stop, finally sneaking a hand up to use the roughness of his fingertips to tease, then finally, slowly, dip in, exploring as if his life depending on wringing the low, guttural moans that become breathy, my fingers tightening sporadically on the rope.

He’s moving a little himself, the rope tugging gently in my hands.

I don’t want to sit up but I do, pushing him away. As I thought, he is touching himself, and I pry his hand away with my foot. He lets go easily, looking up at me from his knees.

I’m close, very close, but getting close without letting it tip over the edge is also fun.

And he is hard, very hard but not quite there himself. He climbs up on the bed easily when I pat it and push him down on his belly. The rope with the hook slithers out of the cage on his torso and I put it to a new use, bending his legs and elbows up and bowing them slightly, webbing the rope until any movement of his arms or legs rocks the hook again.

I want to start with the ball flogger, but it’s best to start small and work larger, or in this case more painful.

Instead, I pick up the cane. It’s thin, promising a deep, nasty sting and a whistling cut through the air. He eyes me over his shoulder, following the cane up with a faint flush that stains his cheeks.

He’s familiar with this one, is he?

When I lay a stroke on the bed next to his head, a whistle that shrieks through the air before thudding into the mattress, he makes a high little shriek despite himself, the sound re-awakening the dull throb between my thighs.

Gotcha.

I’m gentle for the first strokes, trying him out as much as the cane, a relatively effortless bounce of the wrist that leaves thin, pale red stripes. He still moves for the strike, the hook jiggling where it parts him. As the strikes start to whisper in the air, he shudders, his webbed elbows and calves making him unstable and forcing him to rock back and forth, the hook rocking with him as he gasps.

I’m keeping this hook. It’s too good, the way it makes him squirm, no doubt cold and unyielding in his guts.

By the time the cane whistles, his face is red, the hook playing easily in him as if moves. When the fine red lines rise purple under his skin, I switch to the little flogger, dragging it across his parted legs and to the tight purse of his balls.

I don’t hit him hard with it, but I don’t have to, each helpless writhe making a wet sound as the hook moves.

He hasn’t given me what I want, just a symphony of gasps and moans, breathy little sounds that, sexy as they are, are not as abandoned as I want to make him be for this, for all this.

But I can do more.

I untie his elbows and calves, letting him wring feeling back into them. The hook is still seated in him and I feed the rope back through the cage around him, letting it dangle over his shoulder and helping him stand.

When he turns, I am stepping into the harness.

The breath he takes is choked off with lust, rising like heat in his dark eyes. It’s not too large for him, or he’s ambitious. Either way, he’s quick to his knees as I finish the last buckle, the base of the cock and the small ridge on it settling snugly and wetly inside my lips.

He’s good at this, too, knowing to move it with his hands and mouth, the ridge in it easily finding and strumming my clit.

He’s a very good whore, and for a fleeting moment I’m glad we met, that he walked into my club instead of another on the strip.

Mouth open wide, chin wet, hands stroking, the heavy purple head disappearing into his mouth as his eyes roll up, looking for approval—I can feel myself starting to squeeze, cunt searching for more stimulation.

He looks pleased, and when I jerk the rope, his hips hump forward.

When I pull up sharply, he stands, wiping his chin off, and lets me bend him over.

The hook comes out easily, glistening with lube, and he’s already open enough to let me slide several fingers in and out as his head comes down to rest on the bed. A very short time later, he’s more than open enough for the huge cock that juts out of the harness, his knees bending slightly.

No matter how prepared he is, I still have to push firmly to slide it into him, a first resistance that gives way as he gasps loudly, fingers knotting in the blankets. Slowly, fraction by fraction, I slide in until the whole length is inside him, the skin of his ass flushed and distorted, open almost comically wide around my cock.

I know exactly how he feels, so I wait, stroking the tense and trembling flesh of his hips and ass until he can loosen, taking his first deep breath. I pull him up slightly and walk him to the huge windows looking out over the city, something I’ve always wanted to do or have done to me, pressed against the glass.

He complies, pressing his chest against the cold glass, back arching. At the suggestion, he puts his hands on the window, flat against the blackness behind it so I can see them, so he has to wait for my permission to touch himself.

When he licks his lips, uncomfortable, I begin.

As I suspected, when it came right to it, he babbles in another language before he comes, white lashing the glass in streaks under his red face.

He is quick to turn when I pull out of him, nearly scooping me up to get me on the chair by the bed, my legs thrown over his head.

I only thought he was enthusiastic before, his fingers exploring, finding, scissoring, tongue quick to stroke and to wring a shrieking orgasm from me, my thighs tightening around his head until he cannot breathe.

When I let his head up, he stayed sitting there, my legs slung over his shoulders. His head slowly sank to the side, cradled on the inside of my thigh, and his eyes closed.

I had not realized how tense he is until I saw it fading from him, how much older he seems than he probably is.

His breath is warm against me, slowing with his pulse, and finally he spoke. A name, dropped into the silence as if he had not used it in years, rusty with neglect.

And for the first time in my life, I gave a client my real one. Not for the money, though the money was how we met. Not for love or some other bullshit emotion. Not because he changed my life with his cock, or because he's the best fuck of my life, or any other idiot reason cooked up by a john with too much money and too little brains.

I gave it to him for his trust and what he gave me.

He smiles up at me for that, the first really genuine expression he’s given me. It's a beautiful smile.

I don’t think I’ll see him again.

But I’ll remember him. Fondly.


	6. The Pyro

The club is packed, sweltering despite the chill outside, disjointed arms and legs stuttering across the my eyes with the lights, flashes of blue and red and green reflecting off skin, leather, rubber, and enough body glitter to keep an entire fairy court in style.

I keep telling myself I’m going to stop going to these fetish nights, but hope springs eternal and the cover is dead cheap.

And I’m drunk, that happy state where it all seems soft and amusing, the sweating bodies brushing mine on the dance floor a fun little thrill instead of annoying. Even the heat seems tropical rather than the fetid humidity of bodies packed into a small space and sweating vigorously, the lights making everything new and interesting again.

The gloved hands on my waist are a change, and one that takes me a few seconds to notice before I look down to the thick rubber fingers that very nearly encircle me. I turn around to say something about it, and the sight stops me dead.

He’s wearing a gas mask. A full on, no-shit, functional, black gas mask, the lens just tinted enough to make it hard to see his eyes, filter a heavy disc hanging to the right of his face. He’s wearing thick rubber gloves, a pair of slick rubber pants, and boots that are very clearly worn, not the shiny set pieces every wannabe dominant from here to Folstrom street wears to clubs, to impress the young, dumb, and full of… well…

Heh. Man, all that getting scolded by my mom for having a potty mouth comes back at the weirdest times.

He’s also covered in scars. Actual, honest-to-god burn scars that, in the stained-glass chaos of the lights, look like tattoos, swirling across his bare torso on both sides, to disappear into his pants.

He has those, too, the few unscarred inches of his body covered in them, a Molotov cocktail flexing on his right forearm, a strangely stylized dragon on the left, disappearing into the gloves.

He stands there, hands still gripping my waist, expression hidden behind the mask, the lights dripping off it like oil as they flash.

I must be drunk. I still haven’t shoved him away or yelled at him or any of the things I should do to him for grabbing me without asking. I hate being grabbed by strangers, especially like this, from behind and anonymous. But there’s something about the way that I can’t see his face that I like, that and the thick muscle of his forearms and the way his body looks so well used and rough.

He tows me in and I stumble toward him, catching myself on his chest. The scars are rough, the skin raised in whorls like small screams frozen in his skin.

We’re the same size, he and I, but I feel oddly diminutive, even tiny, looking at him. He’s just so there, so solid that he makes the bodies around us seem like phantoms, his hands huge and iron hard.

I’ve never been accused of being particularly femme, but he certainly makes me feel it, dancing with me like a graceful shadow, skin pulling into mouths as he moves. I wonder what he sees in me—there are any number of men in better shape near us, men taller and more muscular or younger and much more twinky than me, more desirable. He’s downright interesting. I’m fairly sure he could pick anyone up, man of mystery that he appears to be.

But he keeps dancing with me, those hands wrapped around me like a belt or restraints, making sure I don’t run away. The pressure of those hands is doing things to me, that and the fact that I can’t see his face, just the lights and bodies reflected like distant ghosts on the lenses of his mask.

His gaze, at least if he is looking where his mask is pointed, has stayed on me the whole time, reflecting my face in little slivers with the swimming lights and movement, a single drop of sweat wandering beneath the mask and down his chest.

He slows, and I realize I’m just standing there, looking at him.

It’s embarrassing to look so goddamn—I don’t even know. I could blame it on the liquor, but the fact is that he’s just so new, so apparently different than anyone else who has picked up on me at one of these nights. It’s hard not to keep watching him and the way he stands out from the people around us.

The fingers on my waist give a heavy squeeze and I gasp inaudibly into the pounding bass, but I’m sure he saw me, because the thumbs stroke once. His head cocks and he steps back, pulling me with him for a few steps, pushing through the crowd without looking, forcing dancers to move with his shoulders, and how am I supposed to resist that?

When he turns, finally, I reach out for his hand, the glove swallowing my fingers up.

I never leave with anyone, never go anywhere without a safety call or a record just in case, never just go with the flow. I’m too cynical, or realistic, or perhaps just old before my time, and I think it’s about time I did something young again.

When we pass the bouncer by the door, he does a double-take, then calls out after me, sound cut off as the club door slams shut, leaving both of us sweat-wet and over-heated, our bodies steaming in the night.

I expected him to take the mask off but he doesn’t. He just keeps towing me through the parking lot, past my car and finally to a beaten old truck that sits on the edge of a lot worn into the grass by the club overflow, the grass flattened and oil stained. He lets go of my hand to open the passenger door and cleans off the seat, a tank of propane carted to the bed of the truck and tools pushed into a rusty red toolbox on the floor.

Maybe I’m a sucker for rough trade—and I am—but he just keeps getting better. The worn, old truck, the hard muscles of work, scars, tools, the air of someone who is familiar with the limits of their body and the mechanics of movement, all the signs that he works physically for a living, that he is confident, effortlessly physical, neither afraid of being strong nor afraid of me, nor worried about anything I can tell.

The truck starts quickly after a single, apologetic cough, rattling into a roar that tells me the engine is something a little more powerful than it looks. He steers out of the parking lot delicately, though, without a spray of gravel and dirt or any of the damage you’d expect from the ferocious growl of the engine.

We’re on the road for ten minutes or so before it occurs to me that we’re headed away from town, away from my car or any place I could call a taxi to come get me.

I must be drunk. I feel so stupid. He could be dangerous, and I left the club with him. He’s still wearing his mask, still geared up like we’re headed to something a bit more visceral than a little spank and tickle, the truck hurtling through the night on a road that grows increasingly abandoned, even deserted, the clumps of weeds and tough, scrubby bushes growing more and more scarce, ground giving way to rock and sand, crevices twisting through them that would be all too convenient for dumping a body.

For dumping my body.

When I reach for the door, determined to jump out one way or another, he reaches for my hand with his free hand. With an impatient flick, he sends the glove flying and grabs my hand with his. His hand is slightly damp from the glove, but just as hard as it was in the club, a thick layer of calluses worn smooth by the rubber. It’s as scarred as the rest of him, but his grip is gentle, thumb stroking the top of my hand. He says something but the mask muffles it into a series of grunts.

The tone is pleading, though. Or maybe just warning, but it sounds soft, and the brush zipping by on the one-lane highway tells me that if I jumped out, I’d be missing enough skin to make a new man of me.

So I stay, one hand on the door and the other in his, watching him and the windshield, head ticking back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match.

His hand is hot on mine, a bonfire caught in flesh, and even though I should know better, a tingling flush sweeps me. The night, heat, his hardness and the alien bulges of the gas mask, the landscape flickering by and the killing edge of fear—I really don’t know what he’ll do.

I don’t know what’s come over me.

 The truck starts to slow, the seatbelt squeezing me, and a gate opens in front of the hood. Huge, thick steel bars slide to the side, the truck just squeezing inside the open gate before they rattle back into place.

He lets go of my hand then, patting it gently, and steers the truck between an expensive sports car that has no place in the desert and an old, but very well-maintained Cadillac, which also has no business in the desert. The building twenty yards away is huge: weathered concrete, the roof bristling with antennas, no outside lighting but the moon, a broad blue stripe peeling gently from the thick steel doors.

I’ve never heard of anything this large out here, and there would have to have been something. Some news. Some rumor. Something for a place that looks as expensive as this place was to build, and out here in the middle of nowhere.

He walks around me and gestures, beckoning me in.

The gates are closed, and they’re pretty formidable looking.

But he’s not… he doesn’t feel dangerous, exactly. That’s the only way I can put it.

He doesn’t feel dangerous. Well, not exactly.

He stands in front of the doors, holding them open patiently like he could wait all night.

I’m curious. I admit it.

When I start forward, he reaches for my hand and squeezes it gently again. The doors close behind me with a snick, heavier than they look and oddly quiet, as if someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that they could be opened without waking or bothering anyone inside.

He leads me forward, down a wide, dimly lit hall. There are rooms on either side of us, the open doors looking in on bedrooms, a kitchen, a room with a television and couches, anonymous figures backlit by the television into black silhouettes, the faint snatch of conversation quickly fading, replaced by the sound of his boots and mine.

It feels unreal, everything but his hot hand on mine, towing me on.

Am I drunk anymore? Did someone slip something else into my drink?

He stops in front of a room, the door opening into yet another bedroom, and lets us both in. Against one wall, a long table filled with tools and the assorted guts of a machine—hoses, a tank, a nozzle and trigger, a hollow bell. The other wall holds a bed, a chest of drawers with streaky black smudges on it, and a rack of … implements.

A rack of leather gear, let’s say.

I’ve always had a reaction to that kind of thing. Danger, the fact that I still can’t see his face, the rubber and the tools and the hardness of his body where he stands behind me, both hands free of their gloves now and cupping me against him, the hard disc of the mask coming to rest on my shoulder, the faint rasp of his breath loud in my ear.

He says nothing, just stands there with me, looking at whips and crops and muzzles, huge leather gloves that end in a ring that would make me helpless, unable to touch anything.

My mouth goes dry. I mean to say something. I mean to warn him, or to tell him that there’s things I won’t do, but that’s a lie.

There’s just things I shouldn’t do, things I’ve fantasized about but run away from because they’re a real fast way to end up dead.

He doesn’t hold me tight, just rests his arms around me, careful to keep the mask from digging into me.

There’s things I shouldn’t do.

The sound starts nearly inaudible, despite his mask in my ear, a low sound that’s almost pleading, but not quite. The hands around me rub gently, nudging me forward and toward the gloves in front of me, the paddle made of tire treads, the collar with a stainless steel plate that says “pig.”

I must be something.

I step forward twice, staring at the collection, and he steps with me, blazing heat in the chill of a desert night that cuts right through the thin cotton of my shirt.

Could he be a bottom? He doesn’t… he doesn’t feel like one, and he’ll probably be disappointed with me as a top. I don’t make a good one.

Those gloves are expensive. I’ve seen them in catalogs before. The insides are lined with soft lamb’s wool, the outsides buckling together and encasing both arms from mid arm past the fingers, able to be buckled together or apart, the ring at their end used to suspend, or to simply prison someone in soft and implacable leather.

I’ve always wanted to try them, but they were way out of my price range and very few people I’ve ever met or played with had the kind of… the kind of needs that make buying them a necessity.

When I touch them with the tip of a finger, the timbre of the small sounds leaving his mask changes. He firmly turns me around, putting both of those hard hands on the buttons of my shirt and freezing, mask pointed at me like a challenge.

My heart is hammering in my throat, no doubt visible in my neck, the hair on it standing straight up. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that he hasn’t talked, or that I don’t want to anymore.

I can’t stop myself from going limp, chin lifting slightly.

He makes a game of it, undoing my shirt slowly and easing it down my shoulders.

I hope he’s not disappointed. I know I should lose weight, should hit the gym more than I do.

He makes an appreciate sound anyway, fingers brushing the belly I suddenly want to hide, and when I cringe slightly, he straightens me up, his hands hard again, hard enough to send bumps up and down me. When I stay standing up, he circles around me. A rustle, and he’s behind me again. This time, something settles over my eyes and I want to flinch, but his chest is a wall behind me.

Instead, I let him settle it over my eyes.

He rewards me with a stroke, his fingers delicately outlining the muscle on either side of my spine and making me gasp.

The muffled sound coming from his mask sounds like a chuckle.

Footsteps circle me, and his fingers encircle one of my wrists, bringing it up and squeezing it to tell me to hold it there.

When I do, I hear a whispering sound and the clank of metal on metal. I flinch again when the first glove settles around my arm, the wool shockingly soft. The first buckle suggests what the last buckle reveals—it may be soft, but it is not coming off without help and there is no give. It fits too close to let me do more than wiggle my fingers and start to bend my elbows, but no more.

The second glove goes on quickly and I realize they’re heavy. He buckles the first few buckles, locking my wrists together but leaving the rest open.

More footsteps, and this time the rattling clank of chain. The end of the gloves get heavier for a moment and then they start to rise, the chain attached to them clattering as it is drawn up.

He has complex needs, too, apparently.

I wonder, irrationally, if his needs get met anywhere else, if he, like me, has a list of things he fears to bring out into the light, things he has decided he will never get and tried to forget.

Perhaps not, if he has things like this sitting around.

The chain stops when my wrists are stretched out above my head, not so far that I have to balance on my toes but too far for me to touch myself or defend myself from anything he might do.

It goes silent and I find myself straining to hear something, anything that would tell me what he’s about to do.

There is a squeaking sound and a thump, and while I am turning side to side to find the sound, a cleared throat.

“Thank you,” someone says, with a voice of smoke and flames, crackling and whispering to itself.

If that’s his voice, it’s beautifully ruined.

I wonder if the scarring goes into him as well, goes down the tube of his throat and all through him. And for a moment, I want to get down on my knees.

He says nothing else, but I hear his boots moving across the floor, circling me again toward the wall and all the things in it.

Creaks, thumps, slithering, and a very faint clink, then his boots again.

The blood is pooling in my cock, making it hot and heavy, and he hasn’t even touched me yet. I’ve dreamed about something like this for years, but shied away from it in real life, afraid of things I cannot name and plenty of things I can.

I lick my lips and start to stutter out a demand that he be safe, that whatever he does not leave me dead or diseased or permanently broken, and the footsteps stop.

I’m all too aware that he doesn’t have to honor that. There’s nothing I can do to stop him from doing anything, and god help me I’m hard enough to put a nail through a board.

The voice, ruined. “Trust me.”

And again, “Nothing we do will be permanent.”

We?

A second pair of hands, these cold and thin and supernaturally knowledgeable, the way they ghost around me, raising the hair on my chest and making my nipples into pebbles on my chest.

I try to turn, but I can’t, my head shaking back and forth.

The second voice in my ear, rich as chocolate and smooth as silk. “Trust us.”

Lips brushing the side of my neck, a body fitting into mine but taller, wiry and musky, the acrid undertone of cigarette smoke almost drowning the green acidity of cedar, those cold hands roaming now, teasing their way down but not quite touching the waist of my pants.

I should be mad. I should be fucking livid. I should say something, anything, tell them no, tell them to let me go before this turns into something irretrievable, something that I will not let myself want.

If I get any harder, I’m going to faint.

The second voice laughs, the sound rumbling, vibrating his chest.

A third voice, this one warm and full of something like laughter, deep as an earthquake. “Does he trust us?”

Those cold, cold hands stop, the wiry chest moving with the tap and slur of a footstep back, away from me. I hang there in the chill air, stretched, blind, unable to see.

I should say something. I can’t see them. I don’t even know what they look like.

The silence stretches out mercilessly.

I can’t do anything but nod once and be damned for it.

Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell you.

I couldn’t tell you anything but the drunken fire of my nerves, the unreality of the whole thing and every single desire I’ve ever hated myself for burning like a forest fire between my ears and lower.

These hands are warm. They’re huge, slanted down, the sound of breathing high above me telling me their owner is tall, so much taller than me. They circle me and grab, engulfing my ass entirely and I make a sound for their owner, a shocked little eep that makes them all laugh—smoke and smooth and a gut-clenching rumble.

I can hear footsteps moving away and my head turns as if I could see them, as if I could follow them.

A muttered conversation, away from me. I can’t pick any words out of it, but I try, leaning as close to them as the gloves will allow.

It’s cold, cold, the hair standing up on me painfully, the faint whir of a fan exaggerated in the darkness behind my eyelids. I tug at the gloves and chain but nothing moves for me, and even the faint clink of the chain is not rewarding enough. It’s not enough, and the wait is making me more jumpy, the knowledge that they’re out there, somewhere, and I don’t know what they’re going to do. I can’t hear them anymore, can’t hear anything but the sound of my pulse, that faint whir, the denim of my jeans whispering as I shift, the faint scuff of my shoes on the floor, my heart beating faster because I know any second, any second now they could touch me and I couldn’t do anything.

When someone finally touches me, I jump high enough to make the chain complain loudly, the breath leaving me in something just shy of a scream.

The hands are hot, his, his voice calm. “Shhhh.”

They stroke, then undo my jeans with a disturbingly familiar precision, stripping my boots and socks away, then position me with my legs slightly apart, bending my knees with the tip of a boot in the back of my joint. I’m familiar with this position, the few times I’ve gotten to take it. He is going to hit me with something from that wall.

I can’t stop myself from tensing, the distended muscle of my back jumping up, and he strokes me again, tongue clicking in disapproval until I take a deep breath and force my shoulders lose again.

His hands draw back and are replaced by the cool, thin leather strips of a flogger, slithering down and around me restlessly and making me gasp. Over and over, around and around, sliding over me until I calm again, until my shoulders can go down and I get restless, wondering when.

And then, when. A whistle, loud in the silence, a thud that blooms from impact to warmth faintly spiked with pain, driving a grunt from me as the heat tunes up and into pain, a dull red heating to white.

And again, hunching my head slightly forward as my back bows out, seeking.

And again, this time pulled back slightly to sting, the ends marking me like darts, pain and a throbbing that sings in my cock like a plucked string.

And again, the thud moving me forward, throwing my head back in a soundless cry, a guttural noise breaking through my lips.

And again, my eyelids fluttering behind the mask, blood bubbling in my veins like a mouthful of champagne.

I love the flogger, love a man wielding it and the way it makes me alive, stretches consciousness drunken and hot, demands without exception or apology or hope of escape that I submit.

I lost count, sinking slowly into the red haze of it, mouth open, noise pouring out of me, face heating, the slow bloom of pain becoming sharp again, and I realized the implement had changed, something hard and whippy, ridges on it tightening me into something thin and tense, the noise pouring from me becoming high pitched, desperate sounding as I twist and turn, trying to get away and stopped by the chain, sawing back and forth with a high pitched scream as I move.

And more, pushing me past squirming and into flinching, cowering away, the pain a fine, flaying line, tears burning up out of my eyes to be soaked up by the mask, then finally drooping, surrendering, giving up, unsure when or if it would stop, if I would hang there, skin throbbing and burning, empty and getting emptier as they hit me, all but for the stubborn heat between my legs, softer but not less demanding.

Hands, his hands hot and rough, half carrying me as the chain loosens, his body pressed against mine, rough and hard. My sweat rains on us both, and I realize I’ve sweated myself slick, lost in the thoughtless maze of pain.

I want to say something, anything, but I can’t, the words slipping through my fingers like fish, slippery and fleeting.

The gloves are still on my hands, and with a push to the middle of my back, I discover the mattress in front of my knees, landing heavily and unable to stop myself, ass up and panting.

More movement behind me, skin moving, what sounds like a kiss, wet, the mattress sagging as someone crosses it, cold hands, rough hands, hot hands moving me, rolling me over, pulling the gloves and my arms with them over my head, so many hands, the air getting warmer, the inarticulate murmur of voices, my mouth open already, seeking.

Hands on the side of my face, turning it, prying it open wider, the blunt head of a cock touching my tongue and I’m desperate to get it in me, craving, panting. It’s rough, a heavy hoop splitting it, and I know whose cock it is. I lap at him gratefully.

A smoky laugh.

Hands lifting my thighs, parting them, a set on each side, stretching them open until they burn, joining the fire in my back, the snick of a cap opening, and I make another eep around his cock, filling my mouth, because the lube is cold, pouring out over me in a flood, far too much except that hands take it, running slick and relentless over me while another teases me open roughly, another burn in a sea of fireworks, his cock in my mouth moving now, forcing my mouth open as my jaw aches.

Hands. So many hands moving, squeezing, caressing, slick, every nerve in my body firing at once, eyes rolled up in my head, the cock in my mouth salty and sweet and utterly demanding.

Hands and pressure, something settling snuggly around my cock, and when I make a noise of protest, a brief and stinging slap to it that makes me shudder.

The hands come back, caressing, too many to count or understand, the fingers inside me giving one last twitch before they’re pulled out. He pulls his cock out of my mouth as well and I make a whining noise in the back of my throat. The bed shakes, moving again, and I’m not sure if someone has gotten up, or left, or anything but the dips in the mattress that tell me I’m not alone and then someone lifting my legs, forcing my weight back on the white hot stripes of my back.

Something nudges me, the head of a cock, and I tense, pulling myself up slightly against the hands that hold my legs, but I can’t get away from it as it pushes forward and in, burning, stretching, sliding easily into me with the sliding heat that tells me its naked and I throb, scandalized and afraid. Someone makes an impatient noise and the hips flat against my ass shift, knees prodding me as he settles into the mattress.

I have no idea who it is, whose cock moves in and out of me roughly, demanding and getting the muscle to loosen around it, panting above me and a moan echoes oddly in the room. My toes are curled where they rest against someone’s arms, foot arching with strain.

I have no idea whose cock that is, who is fucking me into the mattress with increasing speed, the ring on my cock keeping me from doing anything but squirming slightly, pulsing as the cock in my ass gives one warning throb before pumping me full, my ass squeezing at it as I cry out, the sound cutting through the choked obscenities of the man in me.

I am shaking when he pulls out of me, the hands on my thighs unmoving as someone takes his place, this cock rough with scars and thick, something smooth and cold and made of metal at the end of it that scrapes me deliciously. I know who that is, whose cock fills me up. He holds still for a minute and the hands pull me up further, hands on my hips scooting me down until he can find the right angle to make me make a high pitched scream as he finds that spot like he’s always known where it was, as if he has always known how to make me fly into a million screaming pieces.

And then he pounds it, over and over, as I toss and turn, writhing against those hands digging bruises into my ankles, unable to escape or do anything but buck against him, unable to decide whether to cringe away or hump harder, looking for more.

I can’t come, not with that fucking ring around me, not with my hands trapped above my head so I can’t touch myself, and I can’t think, pain and the unyielding cock in my ass driving me out past bearing, the hoarse screams pouring out of me getting higher and higher pitched, my ass obscenely slurping and gaping as he comes in me with a growl, body shaking where it is pressed to my ass.

And then another cock.

And another.

And another.

And another.

And another.

And another, thin and fat and long and short and hard and relentlessly fucking me as I squirm and babble and moan and cry out, the sound cutting through the panting moans of the man buried in my ass.

And finally, the bed dips so heavily I slide into someone so huge I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk again afterward, the blunt head of it seeming to stretch and stretch and stretch until I don’t know if it will ever stop sliding into me, sliding deep into my guts, lubed by load after load, the hands finally letting go of my ankles as his hips meet my ass. My legs fall, limp, and he picks them up, pulling them and finally me to the side, rotating me on him, breathless , to my side and tucking my legs up toward my chest.

I can barely feel them, can barely feel anything but him inside me, the position filling me until I can’t breathe, and when he leans forward, planting his hands on either side of my chest, I figure out why he turned me.

He’s a huge man. The bed dips so far down it’s hard not to fall into his fists on the mattress, and he leans slightly to the side, letting me take a choked breath before he starts to move.

Christ. I feel him so far inside me I’m surprised he’s not bumping my eyeballs, feel him in parts of me I didn’t know I could feel, the nerves crying out as he invades me and things that were not meant to be touched.

I would cry for him but I can’t do anything but lay there, eyes rolled up my head, unable to move or think or speak.

He starts out gentle, so gentle that he can feel me shaking, body trying to adjust, and it makes him laugh, vibrating inside me where I lay, fetal, spitted on his cock like an offering to some savage god. My tears overflow the mask, and I lose feeling in my thighs, but not my ass and my cock, screaming insanity and need until I feel like the only things left in me are their come, the giant’s cock, and the need to come so badly that I would do anything, anything if they would just take the ring off me, the pleasure edged over into mindless pain.

He picks me up and turns me again, putting me on my knees with a jar that makes my teeth scrape, still buried in me and now picking up speed, my knees shuddering with the rest of me, head and chest pressed to the mattress, his hands on my hips holding me up.

A set of hands join his, and then another, this time snaking around me to tease my cock with hot, calloused fingers. I’m sobbing, great gulping noises that make me sound like a child, the wet slap of his hips against my ass speeding up again as his fingers dig in and the hands on my cock stroke in time with him, and I’m sure I’m going to faint.

When his cock gives a warning throb the man in my ass says something I don’t understand, voices flying over my head, and the ring is ripped off my cock. I scream, and he bellows behind me, his cock giving a heavy throb before flooding me, pumping over and over until I think I’m going to drown, and the hand on my cock gives one last squeeze before I am coming so hard I pass out, neat as a blow to the back of the head and deadly as a stab in the back.

I wake up in my car with the merciless desert morning, fully dressed but so sticky and sore I have no doubt it was not a dream.

On the seat next to me is a single card with a phone number and the cost of breakfast. Even looking at the card stock makes me hard, knowing the card for what it is—an invitation to go back again, willingly, for whatever he has in mind.

I have no idea if I want to burn it or call him and beg. When my fingers close on the smooth paper, I realize my hand is shaking just a little.

When I tuck it into my wallet, it feels like a promise.


	7. The Demo

In the dim light of the bar, the sly cant of his half-smile is nearly invisible, the faint tilt of his shoulders that tells me he is listening all but lost in the gloom. His friends, a strange and unlikely group of men, slump in the tattered corner booth, doing what only god knows or cares about.

I’ve been listening to his accent all night, to the musical lilt of his voice and the way he seems to be the voice of reason in his group, watching him move bottles out of the way and talk one of his friends from trying to jump the table.

I know women aren’t supposed to be this bold, but I’ve never seen him here before and I may never see him again, and you know what they say about missed opportunities.

He’s still leaning on the bar while he waits for the bartender to come back with drinks for his table, but he has stopped there, just ever so slightly turned to hear me, that little half smile hovering on his lips, waiting.

I’m not bold enough to touch him, not without knowing him, but I do the next best thing and come forward, stopping just shy of him, and ask again.

He nods, handing a pile of bills to the bartender and borrowing a tray before loading it and leading me back to the table. When several of the men make comments, he rolls his eye and pulls a chair from another table, scooting a hole between his chair and the man next to him for me to sit.

They’re almost scary up close—a big group of men used to living rough, or something very like it, half-shaven and eyeing me with something that isn’t quite sex and isn’t quite violence, but is still threatening. I don’t know what they do for a living, but whatever it is, it’s macho and undoubtedly dangerous, and it must pay well because they’ve been drinking all night.

He makes a joke about being too tense, the lilt drawing out his words, and they laugh and relax.

After a moment of watching them go back to talking, a conversation that seems to be one part bragging and another part a discussion of war, or maybe tactics, or some topic that concerns fighting—I’m not really listening, I’m watching him, his broad shoulders moving under the cotton of his t shirt as he reaches forward for his beer, the cloth stretching over his arms and the thick muscle beneath them, the fine curls of his hair making a halo around his head, his skin striped like a tiger with scars and dark.

He looks over at me with that smile again and the beginning of a question, and I can’t wait to get him away from his friends, if he’ll come with me. They’re so noisy and he just … isn’t. There’s a kind of quietness around him, a calm that makes me oddly happy. When I reach out, he laces his fingers through mine under the table, his hand rough with calluses but gentle.

The conversation flows on, over and around us, but I can’t pay attention to anything but his fingers, flexing slightly in mine, so much larger. I’d be content to sit there holding his hand until he was ready to go, but he stands up, drawing me to my feet. Fishing a pile of bills from his pocket with his other hand, he says his goodbyes, weathering the teasing with good grace, his teeth flashing in an open grin. Slinging his jacket over his shoulder, he lets me lead him out of the bar, slowing his steps to match mine.

“Well, lass,” he says, coming to a stop in the parking lot. “Where did yeh want to go?”

I clear my throat. He’s beautiful—tall, broad shouldered, back coming down to a tight, round ass, his eye dancing with amusement, and I’m trying to figure out a way to tell him that I’d be happy to spend the night talking, but what I’d really like to do is take him home and fuck him absolutely senseless.

Maybe he sees it in the flush I can feel heating my face, or in the way I keep licking my lips, unable to speak.

“How about,” he says, “we go back to your place?”

I jump, fingers still laced through his, and then nod. He’s amused, and I can do better than this, so I make an effort as I lead him back to my car.

“I don’t… I mean I should tell you my name.”

He shrugs, and it makes my chest ache for a moment with disappointment. “If yeh like, lass.”

We exchange names and it feels oddly perfunctory. I find myself looking down and away, embarrassed. He sighs.

“It’s not this, lass. It’s meh job. We don’t use names, precisely, but yeh can use meh name there if yeh like. They call me Demo.”

I take a breath, oddly mollified, and he smiles gently at me.

“Well, lass, we don’t know each other yet.”

Despite myself, my heart gives a small leap in my chest, thumping as I turn to unlock the passenger door and circle the car to the driver’s side. He settles into my car with a groan before fumbling under the seat for the latch to slide it back and let him breathe.

I don’t live far from the bar, just a shitty little apartment that’s cheap enough to let me furnish it how I like and go out to the bar ever so often, but it’s mine and I don’t have to share it with anyone. He stands in the living room with his hands on his hips, looking at the bookshelves. Before I have time to offer him a drink, he strides to the first one, leaning down to run his fingers over the titles.

“I havenae read this one for years,” he murmurs and turns, eyeing me. “A reader? Isn’t that meh good luck.”

The flush creeps back up my cheeks at the compliment, as well as frustration at talking when I’d rather do something else entirely. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. He takes a breath and sits down on the couch, on my couch, and pats the cloth beside him.

“Come sit with meh, lass. This part is always awkward.”

I open my mouth to say something, but he’s right. This is always awkward, this part where I’m not sure what he wants and he’s not sure what I want, and neither of us knows how far we should or should not go. When I sit down, he holds an arm out, and I settle into him with a sigh.

He’s warm, the breath rushing into him with the sound of a sail in the wind, and just the right size to let me curl up, turning slightly until I can rest my head on his shoulder.

“Well, lass,” he says, voice deep and calm, “what did yeh want ta do?”

I tilt my head, looking up at him, and he smiles before crossing the inch between us, his lips just brushing mine, warm and soft and sending a thrill through me as they open slowly, his arm around me tightening as the kiss deepens, slowly becoming harder before I break it to clamber into his lap, a thigh on either side of his, skirt straining before I wriggle it up.

One of his eyebrows cocks up, but his hands curve around to cup me and pull me close, to let me press myself against him.

“Is that what yeh want, lass,” he says, voice roughening. “Do yeh want me, then?”

In response, I twine my arms around his neck, leaning in to pick the kiss back up, to go back to the slide of his tongue on mine, his hands squeezing where they cup my ass, massaging but never dipping between, where I have started to ache.

When I open my eyes, he is watching me, eye filled with heat and something else. He pulls back, lips reddened, that half-smile back on his lips and something like a challenge on his face.

“If yeh want something, lass,” he says, voice dropping deeper, “yeh should ask.”

I might as well be on fire, the blush coming back so hard I can feel my pulse in my skin, and he responds with the same calm from the bar, waiting as if he has all night to wait, hands still cupping me and holding me there.

I take a breath. “I would… I mean I’d like to… I mean…”

His half smile is now a broad grin, something just a little bit wicked in it, and I can feel my heart surge. After a moment, he takes mercy on me.

“Tell yeh what, lass,” he drawls, “how about I try a little sommat and yeh tell meh if yeh like it?”

I bite my lower lip before finally speaking. “Yes. God, yes.”

With a gentle push, I stand and step back, letting him stand again, towering over me and looking down. He reaches out, gently turning me with my shoulders and marching me down the hall to my single bedroom, warm behind me. At the bed he pulls back on my shoulder slightly, stopping me from falling onto the mattress before settling in close, wrapping his arms around me and holding me tightly for just a moment, the strength of that embrace running bumps up and down my skin with an electric thrill.

I can feel his breath on the side of my neck and a nudge from his chin pushes my head to the side, my eyes closing as his lips descend. “Do yeh like this, I wonder,” he murmurs, lips brushing me as I shiver.

“Or maybe this.” His lips trail down further, tracing to the base of my neck and pressing a kiss to it, my nipples hardening with a gasp.

“Tell meh, do yeh like this?” He presses a line along my shoulder, delicately skipping the strap of my tank top and bra.

“And this?” A line of nibbles, slow little things with the promise of more teeth that move up from shoulder to the side of my neck, and my fingers dig into his thighs behind me.

“Or this?” The nibble becomes a bite, his mouth opening wet and hot, tongue sliding with his teeth before tightening ever so slightly, a tickle that becomes a wave of heat and sweetness, and I shudder once against him, fingers digging into his thighs.

“Do yeh want ta know,” he says, lips brushing my ear, “that I want yeh now?”

I can’t stop myself from panting, fingers knotted in his cloth of his pants, hips moving ever so slightly against him.

“Do yeh want ta know,” he says, nudging my head with his until he can reach the other side of my neck, “what I want ta do to yeh?”

I moan once, loudly, and he laughs, letting me go to stumble forward.

“Well then, lass, yeh will just have ta tell meh what yeh want from me.”

I turn around, ready to slap him for it, but he raises his hands between us, stepping back once.

“Lass, as fun as this may be, I willnae go where I am not invited. Explicitly. So yeh’ll just have ta tell meh.”

I am a panting, sweaty, mess, and I almost hate him for it. Almost.

“I want,” I say, anger making my tone harsh, “to fuck you. Or for you to fuck me.”

The look on his face is pleased, and more than that, the challenge is back, a dare for me to meet him there, to say what I want, to push past the sudden shyness that always seems to make me voiceless at moments like these, and to meet him there.

I lick my lips and his eyes follow my tongue.

“I want… I want…” I am breathing hard. This is harder than it looks, this saying what I have been told I cannot, wanting what I have been told I cannot.

I look down, fingers curling into fists.

“I want you inside me,” I murmur at the carpet. “I want to hear you, to feel you, to make noise for you. I want to see you stop being calm.”

I take a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “I want to make you feel good. I want to feel good.”

He grunts slightly, rocking back on his heels with surprise before responding. “Aye, that I can do, lass. And if yeh can do something for meh, tell meh how yeh feel about what I’m doing. Tell meh when it’s good, lass, and tell meh how to make it better.”

I nod, still staring at the carpet, as the tips of his shoes stop in the circle of my vision. A warm hand under my chin forces it up, my eyes blinking furiously, fluttering with embarrassment, and he steps into me for a kiss, the hand still under my chin, mouth warm and inviting and sweet.

The kiss is sweet, even kind, his arms coming back around me and kissing me dizzy, something slower and more deliberate than I had expected, and even more devastating for it. I run my hands up his chest, the cloth clinging to the hills and valleys of muscle under it, my hands following them up until I can just reach his neck, coming up on my toes, stretched against him and seeking.

He responds by scooping me up slightly, hands under my ass holding me, the kiss merciless until I am ready to start begging, a tiny little whine breaking in the back of my throat.

“Tha’s adorable, that is,” he says, letting me slide down his body. “Do yeh make that sound fer other things?”

I hold his shirt, chest heaving, waiting for the dizziness to subside before pulling it up. He skims it over his head and lets it fall, leaving me staring at the warm wall of him, the dark trail of hair that narrows as it disappears into the loose waist of his BDUs.

He plucks at my shirt—“It’s only fair, lass”—and I let him take it, running his thumbs over the mounds of my breasts in my bra with an appreciative hum in the back of his throat. He pushes me gently forward, reaching for the clasp on my back and fumbling it open, drawing my arms through the straps.

He stands for a moment, looking at them, a small smile on his face, before sitting down on my bed. I need no invitation to straddle him, up slightly on my knees to give him access.

A kiss, small and soft, and another, just grazing, the faint stubble on his chin pricking and then tickling as his mouth moves, lips closer and then sliding open around a nipple, hot and wet and sucking it deep into his mouth, tongue moving as the suction draws me into arching, his free hand coming up to cup the other breast, kneading as the suction slowly edges over into something harder, and with a gasp, my fingers dig into his shoulders. His eye rolls up, seeking, asking, and I nod, speechless and wet.

I can feel a laugh building in him, a delighted little sound that breaks free as his mouth opens to let my nipple pop out of it, cooling in the air.

“And that?” His tone is teasing, but demands an answer.

My voice is breathy, high. “Oh yes, that.”

He nibbles between them, finding the other nipple and drawing it into his mouth until I squirm, rubbing myself against the heat and growing hardness trapped between us, trying to make him feel the same restless need that is building in me, to see if he can feel the same intoxicating hunger that sends fingers of fire through my veins.

His head goes back, eye closing, fingers digging into me for a moment, the cost of patience suddenly expensive, and I want to growl, my face in his, but I don’t.

“Shall we try summat else, lass?”

He rolls, flipping us both until I lay underneath him, his thighs between mine. Challenge and pride and something else, a need for something I don’t know how to name. He puts his hands flat on the bed, coming up slightly, and presses a kiss between my breasts, and another just between them, and another to my stomach, and one to the waist of my skirt, and I wriggle it up before he pulls me to sitting and pulls it up over my head, leaving me only the translucent cloth of my panties. When I reach for them, he growls, then shakes his head, slightly abashed.

I lay back, watching, as he kisses down to the waist of my panties, down the line of my hip, skimming the edge of the lace, before starting up the other side, the expression on his face teasing and certain, watching first my face and then my hips to keep himself from quite touching.

When his lips first graze the cloth, sticky and wet with desire, I gasp again, hands flying up before I tame them. Through the cloth he breathes heat, then the faint vibrations of contact, then the edge of his teeth just lightly enough to be felt as pressure and movement, his hands coming up to grip my hips and hold them still, hold me still as my thighs shake with the desire to wrap them around his head.

Teasing, touching, the hands on my hips keeping me from squirming off the bed, until I am ready to start screaming from the need to get him closer, to be rid of the last little barrier of cloth between us and feel his tongue sliding over me, into me.

And then, rolling the cloth down, my hips bucking with the need to get it off, get it away from me. When he settles back between my thighs, he shoots me a cocky little grin.

“Yeh’ll let meh know, won’t yeh lass?”

When I reach for his hair, he leans in, sealing his mouth over me with a rush of pleasure so sharp I fall back on the mattress, boneless.

And oh, he’s good. Teasing, caressing, sucking, tongue darting out to dip inside me and taste before going back to making me throb, the emptiness of my cunt crying at me, the hoarse moans pouring out my mouth becoming high and urgent as he works a finger, then two, into me, tracing the texture as the skin changes and finding a spot that makes me feel like I am flying out of my skin.

And then I do fly out of my skin, liquefying into sweetness and heat, thighs shaking as my voice goes insensible and he rides out the bucking shivers until I am wrung out, then presses several kisses against me and leans up.

“Well,” he purrs.

“Yes,” I hiss, fingers scrabbling to draw him in, to taste myself on his breath and tongue, to press his skin to mine for the weight of his body pressing mine down.

He kisses me, fumbling between us for belt and buttons, kicking until his shoes fall off and his pants follow.

When I reach down, he stops me.

“I wasnae kidding, lass, when I said yeh’ll have ta tell me. I’ll tell yeh.”

I am on fire. “Please,” I hiss, groping between us to find his hand stopping me. “Please. In me.”

“Yeh’re on top, lass,” he said, rolling until I could look down  at the cocky, pleased expression that does not fade as I sink down on him, eyelids fluttering closed as he parts the still throbbing skin inside me, filling me up and up with a slow noise like a choked moan breaking from his lips and then from mine.

We wriggle for a moment, both seeking the right angle, until he finds it, a high-pitched squeak bending me forward over him.

“I want yeh,” he says, eye fixed on my face. “I want ta see yeh, want ta feel yeh like this, wet and hot and squeezing, want ta see yeh come all ta bits.”

“Yes,” I moan, overcome by the fullness, by his bluntness and the way he shifts slowly, nudging and then pressing hard against a spot that fills the darkness behind my eyes with stars. “Oh yes.”

The pace is slow, achingly slow, patient beyond words, his hands on my hips and his hips against mine setting the pace, sweat rolling down me as he rocks us both and I rock him, unable to stop myself from reaching between us to strum the cord of my clit back and forth, and he lets me do it, the expression on his face intent, the pace never slacking from its deliberate, screwing jolt that fills me up and empties me one stroke at a time.

“And this, lass,” he gasps, and it’s enough to send me out of my skin again, undone and screaming, bowing back to let him stroke harder against that spot, the wet sound of his thrusts becoming liquid as I shudder helplessly.

And still patient, waiting for something, hard and hot and still in control.

I bend forward, eyes glittering with fever, face inches from his, finally able to say it, his body trembling at my words. “I want you to fuck me until you can’t stand to be patient. I want you to fuck me so hard you feel like you’re going to faint when you come. I want you to fuck me into a shaking, incoherent mess, to make me worship your cock like god, on my knees and begging for more.”

And at that, his fingers tighten and we roll again, my thighs wrapping around his torso to let me fuck him back as hard as he fucks me, lips curled back from my teeth, tensing and tensing and tensing with him until he stops breathing and I howl, a harsh sound choked into rasping as my eyes roll back in my head and I come with him, the first throb undoing me entirely.

He pulls away regretfully, curling up behind me, cheek resting on my hair.

“Well, lass,” he says when he can breathe.

In response I reach down between us, finding and stroking, feeling him grow hard again.

“Yes,” I moan, and with a wriggle, fit him inside me again. “Oh yes.”


	8. The Medic

When I met him, Klaus was already an old man, older than the faint speckling of white in his hair would imply, older than time and weighed down by the helpless knowledge that death will always steal what you work hardest to keep.

It is a common malady in doctors. They start out so idealistic, every one knowing that death will claim their patients, but hoping that for this child, or mother, or father, their loved ones weeping by the bed, that they will be able to push the final chill of death away just one more time.

And then comes the bedside, the trauma bed, the hand of someone they did not have to know falling limp, death coming on with a bang, or like a creeping flood, or the tide going out into darkness, and nothing they can do will stop it.

They take it personally. They have to. Even when they don’t want to. Even when they know it’s coming, when they try to brace themselves until something deep inside them turns like a screw and their empathy goes out, too, making them both more human and less.

No human is able to stand in that tide for too long, not the way a doctor must, without something being lost.

And Klaus, poor Klaus, let his go as quickly as he could, but like the trash on the tide, it kept coming back for him.

I could blame the war, and I do, but also the rent heart of a doctor and the great lengths to which he had to go in order to survive. The fact that he is German is so often held against him, though like many Germans he was no fan of fascism. But no single man can hold back the ignorance of his neighbors, their fear and frustration and the need to punish a world that had punished them after the first world war.

My heart aches for him, what remains of it after the things we have done together in this timeless little slice of hell. My heart aches for myself as well, somewhere beneath the calluses and dead weight of guilt, and I know he is similarly burdened.

It makes small things impossible, the little displays of affection that are so endemic to other lovers—he will never snuggle me. We will never have children together, never be able to simply live together with the comfort that so many lovers take for granted. We will never kiss, will never tell each other that we…

What we are.

The first acknowledgment of a love so soft would shatter us both, would lose the drowning floods that we have both worked so hard to stem, would kill us both with memory.

Instead, we have this.

Klaus is no fool, the hair-trigger of violence never far from him, much like me, which makes this all the more dangerous.

And I am not a small man, making hiding difficult.

I manage, however—showering quickly, eating with a sullen snarl and stomping to bed as if I am offended by the very existence of the ground I walk on, retiring before any of the other men can try to engage me in conversation, before the Engineer, in his sweet and utterly misguided way, can try to get me to talk it out.

He has no idea what he is asking me to do.

How could he?

And after the base stumbles into their collective beds, I am out of mine, a huge, dark ghost in the halls, barefoot and dressed in nothing more than an old pair of sweatpants, gliding one careful footstep at a time between my room and his.

Every time, the thrill of opening the door, the thrill of wondering if he has remembered to grease the hinges, wondering if he will be so asleep that he mistakes me in his dreams for men from so long ago, and lashes out the way he had to do for so long.

But the hinges are greased and silent, and Klaus is sitting awake, boots resting on his desk, still wearing the mud and the blood and the sweat of the day, hair in great, sticky clumps that have fallen down over the circle of his glasses, a bottle of whiskey in one hand and his gaze, blank and overfull, staring through the door and me.

He is like this sometimes, when the memories and the fingers of death have once again taken from him everything from the sweat of his work to the body of his compassion, bleeding out on the floor.

And when he is like this, every time—the bottle, his fingers tightening before he throws it at me, rushing forward to grapple me against him as if I were death itself and he could force me down, taking everything back.

And every time, I force him back, force him on his back onto the bed and hold him as he changes, the simple force of my body over his letting him simply let go of what he is required to hold, required to uphold, the terrible wound of memory and empathy, the burden of being composed, of being a man among these men, of being on guard and watchful of the violence we commit with such ease.

I can feel it in him, his body raging and then, like a switch, going limp, the wild look in his eyes fading and replaced by a calm so viscous, so real it feels as if I should be able to drink it down.

When I let him up, he is drunk with it much more than the whiskey dandling its warm fingers through his veins—drunk with the ability to let go, to be what he desires just for now, just for this circumstance.

When I let him up, he is the man he might have been, decades ago, before the bodies stacked in their blood like walls around us.

He smiles, shyly at first, then more broadly, and it breaks my heart, this smile without artifice or sarcasm, the beam of it bright and beautiful as I step back to sit at his desk, knees spread.

He smiles like a boy, crawling forward, his coat making trails on the floor, brown flakes of dried blood, small clots of mud, crawling for my lap and my legs and the brief comfort he finds between them.

The scrutiny of his worship is terrifying in its own way, the singularity of focus that made him a doctor, the diamond hard brightness in his eyes turned to me, to the already-stirring weight of my arousal, electric and heavy.

And when he reaches me, he crouches, booted shins brought up, his coat like wings puddling on the floor, a baritone purr already rising from him, mouth opening, body yearning forward toward mine, to become complete the way he becomes complete when we are together like this.

He breathes, nibbles, tongues me through the thick fleece of the sweatpants, his purr becoming a greedy little whine, never looking up at me, at my face, to see the impact.

We have agreed together, not in so many words, that there are things we cannot bear to see—he cannot bear to see the look on my face.

There are things I cannot bear, but I will bear them anyway like this, elbows on the arms of his chair, casually uncasual, his mouth raising the dead with intensity, raising the hair on my body, raising the tired ache of my bones into a humming tension, current running deadly and invisible through a wire.

I will not let him bring me this way, though he would if I let him, his mouth soaking the fleece until it almost feels like there is nothing between us.

I push him away, sprawling, back flat on the floor and bruising his elbows, his feet flying out from under him to lay on the cold concrete.

I know how I look to him when he is like this, a resentful and angry god that he papers over with memory from the stern churches of his childhood, with the stern dictates of faith and medicine and the inhuman demand of compassion.

I tower over him, the jut of my cock like a weapon, and he loves me and hates me for it.

He is hard, the baggy crotch of his slacks no match for him.

He needs my strength, needs to be forced to give up what he has been told he has to keep at any cost, what he desperately wants to give up.

I need to see the vulnerable curve of his back, to hear his gasped moans, half-choked with sobs, the feel of his body going slack around me. I need to feel him submit in that invisible tide that flows between us, to torture myself with the words I could only say at a time like this and all the words I will never say.

Conscience is a goad and a sickness that I use on lust for him, but oh how it stings me.

It is not so hard to pick him up as he scrambles backward, to throw him one more time on the bed as the mattress groans and the bed frame screams, dry wood against wood.

One more time, he responds with a trembling eagerness to be naked of clothing, but still armored with his reserve, skin still streaked in blood and salt and earth.

I would have wanted to fuck him anyway, even without this blood-thirsty intimacy—the beginnings of crow’s feet around his eyes are unbearably dear, the salt in his hair dignified, the faint beginning of a belly—he is precisely what I find attractive, a body age has made elegant.

It is unbearably dear the way he scrambles up, naked, reaching, unable to lay there without me, without my skin against his, feverishly mouthing the ridge of my collarbone, the heavy muscle of my arms, hands shaking with need, the way he whines when I push him back and undress myself.

I am long past hoping that someday he will be able to tell me all this with words—he hides it from himself when he is not naked, stretched out on the bed, cock a pale staff that already leaks, strings dancing between it and the skin of his hip, where his slacks trapped it.

But he does not hide it here, the way his thighs slide open, the thin layer of dark hair parting around the dusky skin of his ass, begging me in silence to fill him, to close the gap between us in a small, dark space hollowed out of our pain.

I will close it, but not just to come and put myself away, leaving him slick and stretched, languid warmth slowly fading from him as he falls asleep.

He would be disappointed, too, I think.

My first slap is more gentle than it looks, a contemptuous backhand that rocks his face flat against the mattress, hard enough to ring his ears but not to bruise.

And again, towering over him, the other hand on his chest to hold him still, a mute and enraged god who does not care about his excuses, his needs, his precious and petty little dignity, his body as anything but a vessel.

It is the way our gods must be—the insensible, unreasonable, and all powerful. The unappeasable and all mighty force of death, the one thing we know to exist.

And oh, it will make you high, to be the image of his god.

He gasps, hands flying up to manacle my wrist on his chest, robbed of their usual strength by the force of his need for this, his need to be confronted by what he cannot overcome.

The next slap is a gunshot, his eyes rolling in their sockets with the force, bruise rising blue on his face.

Words would only ruin it.

I finger him without lube, forcing fingers made rough by the gun, its huge weight and the steel strength of holding it all day more than enough force to push into him, though his ass pushes back at me before simply surrendering, the hands on my wrist falling to his sides like the wings of a dead bird, a wide halo around his body, his eyes closed and lids fluttering.

He parts without the lube first, the heat of friction paining even my fingers, the first prickle of tears making clump of his eyelashes.

When I slather the thick jelly on him, he starts to sob, great tearing things, the work of pain leading to this easily, gracefully. It is my job to lead him out from here another way, out of the maze of sensation, overwhelming.

And so I do, forcing myself into him, past the clinging rings of muscle, sliding into his too-tight fit with a hiss as his body arches up off the bed, mouth open, tears spilling, his thighs still held wide and trembling with tension, fists clenched.

He subsides down as the muscle gives again, tension that was almost pain becoming merely snug.

I fuck him the way the god he has made of me would, brutally, without a care for his pleasure or his pain or for anything but the rising, white hot tide of pleasure that makes my skin burn, lights me up into a pillar of flame dousing itself in him, and as his hand sneaks between us and wraps around his cock, roaring with bloody victory, his sobs broken by moans or perhaps the opposite, the sound of his life spilling out, filthy, on his sheets.

I come with my hands wrapped around his neck, his face purple.

It is times like this I want to tell him I love him, want it to sink into the parts of him I expose this way so that he has to hear me, has to believe that what I am doing here I would never do for anyone else, could never do with anyone else, but I cannot.

I cannot tell him that as he comes, muscles clamping down on me hard enough to bruise, his breath a hideous gargle in his chest.

I cannot tell him that as I slide out of him, not even when he grabs my hand and presses it to his mouth, the only kiss he will let me have, and maybe the only one we can have, the kind of men we are.

I cannot tell him any of this, the lump in my chest dissolving me around it, as I pull my sweat pants back up and leave, sweetness still thundering through my veins.

It would kill us to say.


	9. The Sniper

The last train beat me by two minutes, pulling away from the station in a dusty gray cloud of ash and soot, the new air regulations doing dick all to prevent the soup-thick smog after they were stripped of teeth by the current party.

But the trains run on time, and that’s really all anyone cares about.

I would have given a lot for them to run a little late, one more strike in a day filled with them—missed meals, the angry squawk of a client so loud I did not need to press the phone to my ear to hear it, the scowl of my manager, a co-worker who made promotion when I did not.

And now the wooly light of the street lamps, filtered through the chimneys of a million houses, little pale puddles on the concrete of the empty station, all windows shuttered, doors locked, my apartment and a warm dinner several miles away.

The sky gave a terse growl as I stared up at it, a warning that it, too, was done with me.

There was no help for it, nothing left but to walk the miles between my apartment and the station and hope the sky would have a little mercy on me.

A few blocks later, the growl became a ferocious roar as the heavens opened up and god himself pissed on me. I swore and ducked under the nearest awning, the roads blind with smog and now sheets of water, pouring up, down, and sideways, as far as I could tell.

There was no way I would be able to keep walking in that. If I didn’t fall in a canal, I’d be too lost to find street signs, let alone find my way back to my apartment, starting to resemble nothing so much as Nirvana, a possibly imaginary heaven where I could strip the dripping coat from my back and finally get something to eat.

The store behind me was closed as well, the clothing in the window muddied by the failing light.

Down the street, a light still shone, too uncertain to be read but still inviting.

I dashed through the rain, briefcase tented over my head, pants legs soaked through to the knee and socks wet enough to squish. The light was a single, dim marquee over a thick door, the caption faded and blurry.

But there was no point in standing outside, so with a small push, I let myself in.

First impressions—a bar, ancient fug of cigarettes staining the ceiling yellow, the room small and dark and jammed tight with the kind of solitary drinkers one finds among veterans, criminals, and the embittered. Serious men, for whom their beer was a lifeline, and men who would happily gut you if you got between them and the beveled glass bottom of their pints. Smoke and filth stained advertisements for cigarettes and booze discontinued generations ago. Wood planks that might have started as a much lighter wood than the nearly black and sticky stairs and bumpy floor.

I stood there for a moment, dripping, and seriously considered running back out in the rain, but it was too late. The bartender turned toward me, his eyebrows rising. No doubt I looked like a drowned rat or a drowned cat, hair plastered to my head, makeup long since smeared into clownish streaks, pants soaked through and clinging, coat making puddles on the floor.

And then he smiled, a mostly toothless thing, and gestured to the last open stool. The sky gave a resounding crack and the lights flickered, the rumble of the rain becoming a roar that threatened to drown out the growl of conversation in the bar, which paused, heads swinging up to stare at the ceiling before resuming again.

I hung my coat up on the racks beside the door and sat down on the stool. A beer or two, to wait out the rain, and then I could walk home.

The beer was surprisingly good, and while the peanuts on the bar were no substitute for an actual meal, they were better than sitting, hungry and listening to the rain. I promised myself no more than two pints, stretching them out as my hair frizzled around me, the rain drying from it bit by bit and leaving it a wilting cloud, the lighter ends curling up and the darker still heavy against my back. Finger combing it merely made it worse, so I put my hand down, fingers drumming restlessly on the bar.

The door opened again with a horrendous creak and banged closed, letting in the continuous roar of the rain before cutting it off again. I didn’t bother to look up, warned by the noise that it was still pissing down.

A few seconds later, someone cleared their throat behind me. I looked up to see a wiry, weathered man, water dripping from the brim of his hat, huge hard sided case of a horn balanced on his foot. A pair of pale yellow glasses hung from the vee of his shirt, all dripping the way I was. He made a scooting gesture with his hand and I flushed and scooted the stool over. It was only polite.

He propped the case between the bar and his booted foot, leaning against it patiently for the bartender, who scuttled over.

He ordered a coffee and a shot of whiskey to pour in it, then made a face while he dug his wallet from his pocket, wrenching it free with a shower of cold rain water that painted us both.

“Sorry ‘bout that, sheila.” He gestured toward the spray, invisible in the still soaked mess of my shirt.

I laughed ruefully, shaking the affected arm for a fresh spray of water. “Can’t tell the difference.”

He snorted, taking the excuse to look me up and down. “Imagine not. You’re right soaked.”

I liked him immediately, and there are worse ways to waste time than talking to someone likeable. “You, too—Aussie?”

One side of his mouth came up in a fan of friendly wrinkles. “Something like that, sheila. You a local?”

“Yeah.” I looked around. “Never been in this one before, though.”

He looked around the room slowly, taking in the hunched shapes of drinkers, the sticky film on walls and floor, the ancient advertisements. “You look out of place. No offense meant.”

The last, aimed at the bartender, rolled off him with a shrug as he placed the cup of coffee and the shot in front of the Australian.

The Australian poured it in and took a belt from the coffee cup with a grimace. Instead of putting the cup down, he gestured toward a small booth at the back of the bar. “Come on. Rather sit than stand.”

I followed, watching his tight ass in his jeans as he wove through the tables, balancing coffee cup and the horn case easily. For a guy old enough to be my father, he was well preserved—muscle tight beneath his clinging, soaked clothing, shifting as he moved.

The booth was sticky, but no more so than our clothing. He tucked the horn case beneath the table with care before plunking down into the booth seat. I followed, sitting down with a distinct squelch and a wince.

“That wet, eh?” His eyes crinkled with amusement that did not fade as I blew an impatient raspberry.

“Weather.” I looked at the edge of the case where it was just visible under the table. “You play music?”

He tensed immediately, shoulders rising beneath his shirt, and eyed my face for a minute before answering. “Something like that, sheila. Something like that. What’re you doing out on a night like this?”

I blinked. Maybe he had a bad performance, or something had happened to his band. “Missed my train. I had a shit day at work, then a shit day trying to get home. I’m waiting the rain out to make my walk back.”

His shoulders lowered slightly and he made an apologetic chuckle, taking another swig from his coffee. “Had one of those myself.”

Behind us, the bartender switched an ancient radio on, a blast of static briefly cutting through the conversations around us. Fumbling with the dial, he searched past music and white noise before finding a news program just in time to catch the end of an emergency broadcast. “…Weather warning for all surrounding areas through tomorrow morning. We repeat our message: the prime minister has been shot and is in critical condition. The police have cordoned off the greater metropolitan area to search for the shooter. All residents are advised to return to their homes and remain until further notice.”

The bar went silent, drunk, bloodshot eyes turning toward the radio. Across the table from me, the Australian sighed, an irritated noise. The bartender cleared his throat and turned the radio off before putting his hands on the bar and taking a deep breath.

“You heard them, loves. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Across the table from me, the Australian muttered something in a vicious undertone. When I looked over at him, he spoke, eyes meeting mine before boring a hole through the table. “My hotel, sheila. My hotel is in the middle of downtown, near the government buildings. I needed some beauty sleep tonight, and now if I try to make it back, I’m liable to be swept up in their search for the shooter.”

I blinked. He had a point, and the local police were xenophobic, paranoid, and slow to release anyone from custody, as well as being famously corrupt. If they caught him trying to go back to his hotel, he would be lucky to spend a month in jail while they sorted things out. If he weren’t lucky, they’d assume he was a part of it as a foreigner visiting from a neutral country, and he’d be in jail for years, if he got out at all.

He didn’t seem like the kind of man who would deserve it.

“If you don’t mind my couch,” I said slowly, “you can stay the night at my place.”

He grinned, teeth bright against the deep, baked-in tan of his face. “You’re a beaut, sheila.”

“We still have to find it in the rain,” I said, standing and pulling my wallet out to pay but he put his hand over mine, shockingly warm despite the wet chill soaking through me.

“Least I could do.”

I let him tuck a thin sheaf of bills beneath our glasses and followed him to the coat rack, pulling my damp wool coat on with a grimace. He pulled a heavy leather jacket on over his shirt, making a similar face, then turned expectantly.

“Lead the way, sheila.”

We ducked out into the rain together, part of a stumbling stream of bodies headed out into the wall of water as the bar emptied.

___________

It took an hour to find my apartment, leaving us both beyond soaked and in a state that resembled swimming more than walking. By the time I wrestled the door open, stuck in the damp, I had given up on everything I was wearing. We stood, a pool gathering beneath our feet, in the tiny tile square beside my door. He stripped his coat off, hanging it on the back of my door instead of the coat rack over the carpet, then balanced his hat on top of it, exposing a thick shock of shaggy, dark brown hair and side burns that could have used a trim.

I draped my coat over a chair sitting almost on top of my radiator, in the tiny kitchen.

“Mind if I…” he gestured and then walked his coat and hat over, draping them as close as possible to the chugging coils of the radiator.

I sighed. “Don’t think I have anything that will fit you, but I can at least share a hot shower with you. You can go first.”

He grinned. “Wouldn’t dream of it, sheila. You go.”

Gratefully, I scooped a pair of thick, woolen pajamas and underwear out of my chest of drawers and squeezed into my tiny bathroom.

I hurried as fast as I could, scrubbing the dark streaks of makeup from my cheeks and giving my hair a quick wash and extra layer of conditioner to encourage it not to puff into an unruly cloud around me as I slept.

When I came out, he had made himself a cup of coffee and sat huddled up beside the radiator, his long-fingered hands spread toward its warmth. “Didn’t think you’d mind, but I can pay you for it. Just wanted something to keep me warm.”

I did, in a vague sort of way. He’d made himself comfortable, but I hadn’t thought to offer, and the rain had been more than chill enough to make us both sick. So I shrugged and gestured toward the bathroom.

He unfolded himself from the chair, swiping it with a hand towel, and ambled into the bathroom, cup in hand and thanking me again. I waited until the shower cut on with a screeching rattle before giving the chair a more thorough wipe down and then sitting in it, still warm from him.

He had a point. It was beyond cold, and we obviously weren’t leaving the apartment until the search was called off. I stood and fished a bottle of vodka I’d been saving out of the small cabinet over my oven, pouring myself a healthy shot in a coffee mug and topping it with what was left in my small pot.

It helped.

By the time he came out of the shower, toweling his hair dry and padding barefoot in his still soaked jeans, I was quite warm again despite the heavy, soaked mass of my hair. I blinked up at him owlishly, up and up the long line of his torso, hard despite the faint peppering of white in it.

He chuckled. “Been that kind of day, sheila?”

I nodded with a disgusted snort. “All day today.”

He pulled the towel away from his head, leaving it in sharp, chaotic spikes all over his head. “Your hair’s still wet, sheila. Doesn’t seem like any point in wearing dry pajamas if you’re just going to get them wet again.”

When I didn’t move, he padded across the space between us and lifted my hair, tucking the towel between it and the damp patch on the back of the pajamas. With a series of deft squeezes, he coaxed much of the water out of it as I sat, frozen, fingers still curled around the coffee cup.

After he’d gotten most of it out, he pulled the towel out from under my hair and walked it back to the bathroom, for all the world as if he’d been doing it for years.

I sat there, blinking, startled, until he came back, but unable to figure out what to say to him about it. He hadn’t hurt me, or really done anything dangerous, or even done anything unkind. He’d simply made himself comfortable.

I had invited him in, and maybe he just was one of those people who took over spaces.

He stopped by the chair, hands on his hips. “Eaten anything, sheila?”

 My guilty flush made him shake a callused finger in front of my face. “Bad idea to drink on an empty stomach.” He paused, looking at the confused expression on my face. “Mind if I make something?”

Completely at sea, I nodded, gesturing toward the kitchen. Rubbing his hands together, he inventoried the refrigerator and cabinets, then set to work.

Half an hour or an eternity later, depending entirely on how you look at it, he’d made omelets, sliding mine in front of me, still sitting in my single chair, and ate his standing up. I ate mechanically. It was good, but I still felt oddly like a stranger in my own kitchen.

The food settled me, however, firming my reluctance and responses.

“What are you up to… I’m sorry, I never did get your name?”

He turned from washing his plate in the sink. “Didn’t give it. But you can call me Mick if you like. Don’t worry, sheila, I know I’m only here for the night out of your kindness. I just hate to not give you something for the privilege.”

I blinked, vodka still fizzing in my blood, but mollified by his response and by the sight of his bare torso, muscle moving smoothly as he tidied up. The kitchen restored to basic cleanliness, he dusted his hands off on his pants.

“This is a bit awkward, sheila, but if I try to sleep on your couch with jeans this wet, I’m liable to leave a mess.”

I flushed, realizing where the conversation was going. He held up a hand.

“Not that, sheila… you didn’t give me a name either, did you? You mind sheila?”

“I… uh… it’s fine.”

“Right, sheila then. I’m not asking to shed my jeans. I’m asking if I can run about overnight in my boxers. I hung them in the bathroom and they should be just dry.”

I nodded in lieu of saying anything, unable to figure out what to say.

When he returned from the bathroom in a very small pair of boxers, the flush rose again. Every inch of him was tanned in a way that spoke of being naked outdoors, the muscle clear in his thighs and the same faint brush of salt continuing down the hair of his legs to his feet, long and sinewy, flexing on the thin beige carpet of my living room.

“If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to think you’re up to something.” His tone was amused, teasing.

I forced my eyes back up to his face, his hair drying into a halo of waves. The expression on it was mischievous, even naughty, and he shook his finger at me again.

“Don’t think that inviting me over means you’ll get something, sheila. I’m not that kind of guest.”

My eyes flew down, his tone, expression, and words making me feel like a child with their hand caught in a cookie jar. He chuckled, a wicked sound, and walked a few steps forward, reaching out for my chin and pulling it up, the skin of his fingers rough.

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t, either, sheila. I’m just saying I’d hate you to take me for granted while we’re stuck here, waiting for the announcement that lets us all go back to our boring little lives.”

The mischief on his face had grown warm, the wickedness raised to an unutterably knowing expression, and quite the dirtiest I’d ever seen, the sheer weight of experience making it very nearly depraved. My eyelids fluttered, oddly afraid of meeting his gaze and the things I saw in it.

I cleared my throat once, twice, and again before responding. “I… I didn’t necessarily mean that I…”

He gave my chin a squeeze before releasing it, his tone lighter than the expression on his face. “Me either, sheila, but there are worse ways to pass the time.”

When he turned, I took a deep breath, heart hammering in my chest, eyes finally closing in a slow blink. That had been… something else. Something completely not like the tepid dates I’d brought home over the years, unlike anything but the first excitement, the first time I had finally decided to have sex, in the moments before I had been disappointed by the fumbling comedy that was losing my virginity.

His voice, from several steps away. “I don’t suppose, sheila, that you have a spare blanket to toss me. It’s a bit chill to sleep in my skivvies without it.”

I scrambled up, knees clumsy, and stumbled to the closet to pull a quilt from it and hand it to him. His fingers lingered on mine, still feverishly hot.

“Of course,” he said slowly, “there are ways to stay warm.”

When I reached for him, he stepped quickly into the space, letting the quilt fall in a puddle around our feet. A convulsive pull and he’d pulled me off my feet, my legs wrapping around him by instinct, ankles locking to hold me as much as his hands under my ass held me up, his lips seeking and finding mine, slightly rough from chapping and as muscular as they looked, firm and slightly wet and demanding, a demand I was all too happy to answer as best I could.

I made a squeak into his mouth when he turned and sat on the couch, and he laughed into mine, tongue and lips still moving skillfully in a way that I had not realized was possible, an intoxicating dream from a book or the fetid depths of my imagination, body heating rapidly, the loose folds of my pajamas becoming too much, too tight, too many layers between us.

When he drew back, I could only stare at him, dizzy.

“Been a bit, sheila, or have you been without good company?” His fingers tightened on my ass, a thrill raising the hairs on my neck with tiny electric complaints that he had stopped.

My mouth opened and closed, bee stung by the faintest edge of scruff rising around his mouth. I had no idea what to say to that, how to go back to talking as if he hadn’t kissed the daydreams right out of my head.

When I didn’t answer, he clicked his tongue. “I’ll guess bad company. Can’t imagine you go too long without a willing friend.”

I grunted, finally able to free my vocal cords, and he laughed again, the motion jiggling his knees under me.

“I do love a sheila with some unmeet needs.” He paused, looking me up and down. “Well, how about it then, sheila? Got some unmet needs?”

In response, I curled my arms around his neck and drew him back in for another toe-curling kiss, the suffocating layers of pajamas between us rapidly becoming a crying shame, a crime against humanity that must be solved for the sake of sanity.

The knock on the door very nearly reduced me to tears, a red-faced, panting mess. He tensed immediately, eyes darting toward the case by my door.

A knock again, the knuckle-bruising rap of official attention. He leaned forward, lips pressed to my ear and sending shivers through me.

“Sheila, love, it would be easiest for us both if you were alone tonight.”

He had a point, an unwelcome intrusion in the throbbing fluff between my ears—if they were searching for a stranger and I had one, the best I could hope for is a few days rotting in a cold prison cell while they investigated me.

I shivered, pushing myself off his lap. He stood rapidly, walking with surprisingly silent feet around the apartment, gathering his hat, coat, and clothing, as well as the case, and easing into my bedroom, shutting the door as I started to unlock my front door, pulse still high.

The policemen standing by the door were wet, irritable, and armed to the teeth, the heavy shapes of their rifles and the thick bulges of their bullet proof jackets immediately drawing my eye.

“What took so long,” one of them growled, eyeing my disheveled top and drying hair. “What were you doing in there?”

My hands were shaking, fingers white on the door knob, blood screaming in my ears. “I—I was showering. I got caught in the rain coming home and I had to wash it from my hair so that it won’t be wild. I—I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”

The second officer eyed the stubble burns on my chin. “Showering, eh? Do you have company in there?”

I took a deep breath, willing the room to stop tilting. “I was—I’m so embarrassed. I get these hairs and I—”

He cut me off with a gesture. “Spare us. Have you seen a man tonight? A little over six feet tall, dark shaggy hair, carrying a big, black music case. This man has committed a serious crime, and we must find him.”

And now the room was tilting in earnest, my face burning as the blood drained from it.

“No,” I stammered. “I came straight home from work. That’s how I got caught in the rain, I—”

The first made a face. “You must let us know if you see him. He is an enemy of the state. Hiding him would be treason.”

I shook my head wildly, unable to speak anymore, every bit of concentration focused on not fainting. The man in my bedroom, the prime minister, oh god what they would think if they found him there. They would shoot me in the back of the head if I was lucky. If not, they would take me in, interrogate me in the special cells, the special prison. I had heard stories, we all had.

With a last, suspicious glare, the second spoke again. “You are sure?”

I kept nodding, fingers bloodless on the door, and the first gave an annoyed grunt. “We are wasting time here, troubling her. Look at her. She is seconds from fainting because we simply knocked on her door. There is no way she is hiding an enemy of the state in her tiny apartment.”

He looked me up and down watching my chest heave and stutter. “She would die of fear before she would contemplate it.”

My shocked intake of breath seemed to convince them both, the heavily armed men turning away from my door as their radio squawked, demanding a report.

With their permission, I shut my door with a careful click, fingers convulsing on the locks as I worked them closed. The door locked, I leaned against it, my forehead and palms pressed to the cold wood, waiting to be able to breathe again.

A warm hand snaked around my waist, his lips on my ear again. “Very good, sheila. Very convincing.”

I jumped and the arm tightened. “Oh no, sheila. Now is not the time to faint or do anything dramatic.”

He kissed the side of my cheek. “When I let you go, you will wait just a moment before turning around. I need to do something and I would hate to spoil the mood.”

I clung to the door, listening to a rustle behind me so faint it was barely audible in the brief quiet interludes between rumbles from my radiator. I was going to die. What else could he do but kill me, to make sure I never spoke, never said anything to anyone, never betrayed where he had been.

The first thing I thought of was my younger brother, a bright, up and coming star in the party, and the effect this would have on him. Then my mother and father, their jobs, their ability to eat, fear of their home being taken.

This time, both arms slid around me, hot and tight. “That’s better,” he murmured in my ear, goosebumps still rising.

“I suppose,” he breathed, “that I owe you just a little explanation.”

“I don’t—I don’t want to know,” I whispered. “I don’t want to know anything.”

There was a pause. “That’s smart,” he finally said. “But now we have a new problem.”

I tensed, rigid, waiting for the click of a safety going off, the pillow flattened against the back of my head to absorb the sound. My neighbor had been found just that way a few weeks ago, liquefying in his living room.

He paused, feeling me shake against him.

“Stop that,” he growled. “I will not hurt you. You’re doing me a favor, and I don’t like unpaid debts. I’m not about to kill you for helping me, sheila.”

When I started to breathe again, he continued. “I owe you a little favor, sheila, and somehow I don’t think you’ll want my usual kind of favors.”

I froze, eyes rolling back toward his cheek where it lay against mine. Usual kind of favor? Was he a spy? An assassin? A hired killer? What kind of favor would he think this was worth?

“A killing,” he breathed, lips brushing my ear. “Did you want a life for my life?”

I shook my head wildly, pulling my hair where it lay trapped between us.

“Well then,” he said, “it will have to be something else.”

His breath, hellishly hot against the rim of my ear. Surely he didn’t mean….?

“Before I have to sneak out of your apartment,” he continued, voice starting to rumble, “why don’t I show you a very”—he paused, voice deepening—“good time? We started something very entertaining and I’d hate to leave without finishing the job.”

When I said nothing, frozen again, this time in shock, one arm loosened, fingers firm where they ran down, inching up the hem of my pajama shirt, a perfect, well-tutored tease that wrung a soft gasp from me despite myself.

“After all,” he growled, “we’re stuck here until I can walk the streets again.”

His fingers inched up the top, tracing a knee-trembling path toward the peak of my nipple. “And I hate,” he growled, “to leave things undone.”

My fingers tightened against the door, scrabbling for something to hold, some purchase. The world had tilted out from under me and dumped me out into the abyss, and the only thing keeping me from concluding that I was having the most terrifying nightmare of my life was the steel band of his arm around me and the hand that engulfed, then applied warm pressure, edging slowly over into pain, on my breast.

I flattened my face against the door as his fingers made trails of fire toward the nipple, catching it and squeezing, slow pressure edging over into white hot pain.

“I’m just guessing,” he said, laughter back in his voice, “but all those little acquiescent little reactions in your kitchen make me think that you like a little of this.”

My knees chose that moment to tremble violently, pain cascading over into another kind of heat as my mouth opened.

“My lucky day, sheila,” he said, tone gloating. “But there are better places to do this than pressed to your front door.”

When he let go of me, I fell like a puppet, its strings cut, looking up at him with a dizzying combination of desire and terror. He reached down, pulling me up while I struggled to get my legs underneath me, and with a tug of my hand, pulled us both back toward the bedroom.

His music case, a big, black, hard-sided rectangle, sat unlatched but closed near the bedroom door, the lock I had assumed was to save his expensive horn suddenly proof positive that I had been out of my depth since I sat down at the booth with him in the tiny, shithole bar.

He caught the direction of my glance. “Don’t worry about that, sheila. Remember? You didn’t want to know.”

And I didn’t, my eyes snapping away from it and skittering over to the bed. He helped me to it, letting me sit and look up at him, cringing.

His hands settled back on his hips, framing what his boxers did nothing to hide. “I know this is a shock to you, sheila,” he said, voice stern, “but I don’t make a habit of molesting little girls, and while I like a little fear, that cringing has got to go.”

I blinked, a flurry of darkness and light, the room tilting again, damnably.

“So while I could definitely show you a good time, I don’t want to push it on you.” His lips crooked. “I’m an assassin, but not that kind of man.”

He waited, hands on his hips, breathing slow and calm, eyes hooded beneath heavy brows.

I swallowed, throat and mouth desert dry. I was damned. Utterly damned. If anyone found he’d been there, found out I had lied for him, even found out I had drank a beer with him in that bar, I was dead and beyond dead, as was most of my family.

And I still tingled, still burned, more now as I realized how neat the trap had been, how easily he had manipulated, how easily he had taken advantage of a chance meeting, the easy mastery of his fingers, the easy anticipation and knowledge of my reactions.

I licked my lips, staring at the expression on his face, at the cool knowledge of it, the clear danger and the hard strength of his body.

“That’s a very warm look for such a chilly girl,” he drawled, hands moving just slightly to draw my attention back to what lay between them.

I finally spoke, voice slow and halting. “I—I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t.”

He grinned, a tight mirthless thing. “Right.”

“I—am I going to live out the week?”

He shrugged. “There’s a certain element of luck involved.” He looked me up and down. “I can’t make any promises, but like I said, I owe you. So I’ll do my best.” The expression on his face was cocky. “I haven’t been caught yet.”

I licked my lips again, pulse thundering in my ears. “I don’t suppose you can…”

His head cocked, a look like pity flying across his face. “Not unless you’re willing to give up all this, and only if you turn out to have a talent for it. Anything else simply puts off a very long, very messy death.”

His hands moved again. “But in the mean time, we can have a little fun.” A hand extended. “If you like.”

I wanted to run out of the apartment. I wanted to jump out of the window, letting gravity solve all my problems. I wanted to go back in time and keep walking in the pouring rain, and maybe be lucky enough to drown.

I reached out, instead, taking the devil’s hand and knowing it for what it was, a death sentence dressed up in pleasure.

“That’s a good girl,” he cooed, towing me in. “And now, for some important business: are you a screamer?”

When I stared up at him, eyes wide, he grinned widely, pleasure making his face bright. “I’ll assume yes. Be a good girl and fetch us both a scarf. I’d hate for your neighbors to get any ideas.”

I fetched it numbly, hoping for something I could not name, and he tied it deftly, making sure my hair did not catch in it, then turned me back toward him.

“Tell you what, sheila,” he said, watching my face, “if I do something you don’t like, you’ll just tap twice on the headboard, yeah?”

I wondered what headboard I could tap on to go back and tell myself to stay at work and sleep on the cold tile floor.

“Head’s not in the right space, yet,” he said, laying me down on the bed with surprising care. “But we can take care of that.”

And, like the devil, he did.

Hours and hours beyond anything I had even dreamed of, or heard of, or imagined even late at night, fingers moving between my legs, long past endurance or hope or anything but an endless stream of shame and delight that caught me up like a possession and hollowed me out like an exorcism, a bundle of unholy knowledge that turned me inside out and burned the hope of salvation from even my childhood, reaching backward and forward and into the silent spaces between nerves and memory and branding itself there, to the sound of my terrible, sobbing moans and finally heart-broken pleas for more.

Dawn was pinking the sky when he rolled me over, fingers plucking at the knot in the scarf, soaked and half chewed-through.

“Well,” he panted, letting himself sink back on an elbow, “that was a welcome surprise.”

I simply stared at him, having learned through the night not to look away from anything he was doing, for fear of punishment and the punishment of losing the sight of it, seared into my memory.

He ran fingers through the matted shag of his hair, sheeting sweat from it.

“It’d be a damn shame to leave that here for your secret police to get to know it.”

His hand came down, a finger tapping his lips, and I shivered, looking at it.

“Can’t take you with me, sheila.”

I waited dumbly, unable to speak despite the loss of the gag.

“Don’t want to let you stay.”

His finger drummed restlessly on his chest, my eyes following them helplessly.

“Got any friends like me?”

I shook my head, eyes still following the fingers. He made a grumbling noise, fingers stilling momentarily.

“I’m going to tell you something before I go, sheila, and I want you to repeat it back to me perfectly. If you get anything wrong, you won’t live long enough to repeat it twice.”

My eyes snapped back to his face, centering on his lips as he spoke. A series of words. An address. A message for a man, all repeated back to him flawlessly.

He sighed, stretching, and slowly rolled up off the bed. “This part is where I leave, sheila. My advice to you, love, is to take a shower and go immediately. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t say goodbye, don’t pack a bag, but do wear clothes you aren’t afraid to get dirty.”

He pulled his shirt over his head, flexing it to rid it off stiffness from the evaporated rainwater. “If you stay, they’ll find you. If you say goodbye, they’ll find you. If you try to go to work, you’ll be in a cell before you have time to pour yourself coffee.”

He pulled the jeans on, twisting back and forth to crack his back and loosen the cloth. “But if you do what I told you to, you won’t be coming back here again.”

The hat settled on his head, glasses once again tucked into the vee of the shirt. The lock clicked shut on the music case. “A little advice, sheila. There are worse things than starting over.”

He fed a strap from his pocket through two clips on either side of the case and rolled his shoulders, stretching one last time before slinging it over his back and peering out the window at the first few pedestrians stumbling to work. “And I think you know what they are.”

My window opened with a complaining screech and he threw a long leg over the sill. “If you go, I’ll see you again. If not… well…” His eyes flowed down me and back up again. “If not, it was fun. Tell the interrogators I forced myself on you. Tell them I was just inside the door with a gun.”

He threw the other leg over the sill, reaching up to the cast iron balcony of the apartment above mine, swinging himself up easily.

His words floated down. “But I think we both know that wasn’t the whole truth, sheila.”

I leaned out the window, naked but without the ability to care, watching him gather himself and swing up the balconies to the roof, then disappear.

I closed the window, hands shaking. The apartment stunk like sex, like sweat, like a small stale room that had been too long closed. Looking around, the bed was alien. The room I had spent years in, alien.

The patterning of bite marks and bruises, stubble burns and fingerprints dappling my torso was alien, my torso alien, too, the discarded shell of my pajamas like a chrysalis from which I had emerged, something new and terrifying.

The shower waited. A day of work waited. Nervous glances at police officers, their eventual detainment of me because I knew I could not act like nothing had changed. Interrogation… interrogation. My family. My brother losing his job. My father and mother losing theirs. Prison.

A bullet to the back of my head and perhaps my parents, or exile to some forgotten rim of the world.

Or.

Or the name, the address, the message burning between my ears.

Or never seeing them again, never seeing this apartment again.

And what did he have in mind?

My fingers curled into fists. And if he wanted to own me, he surely could in this situation. He could have anything at all. I would become one of the people on the fringes, one of the people they spoke about in whispers, the stateless and homeless, illegal and criminal. Even if I never shot a man, or smuggled a thing, or did anything more criminal that what I had just done, it would be enough.

Enough to condemn me. Enough to make a trial a luxury I was more than sure I would not get.

What choice did I have?

The answer was easy.

None.

No choice.

His option was the only one I had.

I didn’t bother with the shower, just a t shirt. Jeans. A sweater. A coat and scarf, gloves, my wallet tucked into my pocket, a thick woolen cap hiding the hair that I tucked into the back of my sweater.

I didn’t bother with a cup of coffee, just kept moving, winding through the chilly blue streets until I stood in front of the address, a nondescript warehouse overlooking the dirty brown scum of the harbor.

A word, a name, the door opening and a figure silhouetted against the dark warehouse grabbing my arm and pulling me in, hustling me with bruising force to an office.

A phrase, uttered with a shaking voice to the brutishly cruel face of a man I knew would shoot me without blinking or regret, the flat and empty stare of menace making me want to piss my pants.

A muffled footstep behind me and the sensation of a blow, a white flash going out with my consciousness.

Time passing, some dark and speechless period, incomprehensible.

More footsteps, a dry mouth, words over my head.

“Yeah, this is my plus one. Going to the same place.”

Crust on my eyes breaking, a face swimming into view, his broad smile.

“You made your choice, didn’t you, sheila? Let’s see what you can do.”


End file.
